日本財団 図書館


Seminars on Academic Research of Manga and Anime Part 6
11th October 2005
Is Manga Space 'Japanese'?
Saito Tamaki
 
 I am a psychiatrist so in the end I suppose I should present a pathological analysis. But before that, I would like to begin by talking about how I see manga above all as a manga enthusiast.
 I would like to introduce you to a book Tezuka Is Dead: Postmodernist and Modernist Approaches to Japanese Manga by a manga researcher called Ito Go. The title comes from the idea 'Tezuka is God, Tezuka (God) is Dead'. Previous manga critiques were based on the 'Tezuka origin theory', namely that Tezuka Osamu created everything. Manga critiques based on this theory functioned fairly well to some extent; but they gradually failed to apply from around the 1990s. A lot of interesting mangas are being created, and we cannot say that manga itself has declined, in spite of the fact that the sales of Shonen Jump (Boys' Jump) have fallen slightly, and children have stopped reading manga and have turned to T.V. games. Nevertheless, I think Ito's analysis presents a rather interesting critical perspective which focuses on the fact that the very formulation of manga critique with Tezuka Osamu as a reference point can no longer adequately analyze manga of the post-1990s. I refer to some parts of Ito's analysis here in my presentation.
 Firstly, I will talk about the characteristics of manga. At this stage, I want to continue my discussion leaving aside the issue of whether these characteristics are specifically Japanese, or can emerge anywhere under a particular set of circumstances. But I will be presenting several arguments that suggest the uniqueness of the Japanese in some sense.
 
Timelessness
 Let me talk about the 'timelessness' of animation. Miyazaki Hayao criticizes Japanese animations−especially the 'limited animation' broadcast on television−for having too many 'still pictures'. They stop the picture at a powerful scene or a climax and insert flashy sound effects and long-winded speeches. These techniques clearly originate from manga. As Miyazaki points out, Japanese animation is still very much influenced by manga, and employs much of the manga grammar.
 For example, Japanese mangas often insert unrealistically long narration in scenes that depict a ball thrown by the pitcher reaching the catcher's glove in a baseball game. There is a tendency to infinitely prolong a single critical moment. Nakajima Norihiro's manga 'Astro Kyudan' (Astro Team) is a typical example of this. It takes up three and a half years−2000 pages−to recount the climax match between Astro Team and Victory Team.
 I refer to this phenomenon as 'timelessness'. It can be said to be a very typical kind of manga representation. 'Still pictures' in animation are clearly derived from manga; and timelessness is one of the techniques adopted.
 Miyazaki is extremely critical of such random time stretching found in 'still pictures'. The picture never stops in his animations. There is no lightening flashing in the background or a gigantic sound effect ('gaaan') when the main character is stunned. He never depicts the hero posing stylishly in a still picture. The characters just move on and on without ever stopping; and these movements designate the particular style of Miyazaki's animations.
 On the other hand, Japanese animation in general still uses a lot of 'still pictures'. Dezaki Osamu, for instance, employs them liberally. Their use may have to do with the need to economize the number of cell drawings in the production process, or to create dramatic effects. The employment of still pictures increases the emotional effect by freely controlling the flow of time and prolonging the decisive moment by differentiating movement.
 Ishinomori Shotaro, in particular, is acknowledged as having significantly refined the representation of temporal flow in manga. He liked cinema very much, so his manga also flows like a clock timed film. It does not get unnecessarily longer just because there is a climax, nor are there any large frames used for emphatic purposes. 'Cyborg 009', for example, is composed so that the way the speeches overlap and contrast with each other represent a constant flow of time.
 Nagai Go's works are in contrast to this style. As typified by his 'Devilman', he often effectively employs large frames to create dramatic impact. This is what I mean by differentiation of a dramatic moment. This technique is probably not unique to manga.
 Miyazaki takes up a famous historical narrative called 'Kanei Sanbajyutsu' (Wonders of Three Horses in the Kanei Era). When he depicts the scene where Magaki Heikuro goes up a steep flight of steps of Atago Shrine, he extends time by narrating in many words a supposedly short period of time. This is indeed a typical example of narrative description involving the extension in subjective time of powerful scenes and decisive moments that might be only a few minutes in terms of physical time.
 A psychiatrist called Nakai Hisao talks about 'chronos' time and 'kairos' time. Chronos is the god of time in Greek mythology and also the father of the omnipotent god Zeus. 'Chronos time' here refers to physical time measured by a clock. In this sense, time depicted by Ishinomori is close to chronos time. Kairos is a Greek term translated as 'maturing of time' and refers to what we could call 'human time'. This is a subjective perception of time. For example, we feel that time is endless when we are listening to a boring class, but time passes in a flash when we are with our girlfriend. Such subjective time often expands or contracts. This is what I refer to here as 'kairos time'.
 Nakai suggests that the flow of time differs according to illnesses. For example, people with depression feel that time goes very slowly. By contrast, so-called schizophrenics cannot control the flow of time subjectively. Nakai's hypothesis, in this case, is that 'kairos time disintegrates and chronos time is preserved.'
 Let me take up a scene from Tezuka Osamu's 'Kirihito Sanka' (Hymn to Christ), as one kind of representation of timelessness. The scene where the main character is shocked and troubled is depicted by an abstract picture. I think this is very effective as a method of prolonging time. This kind of depiction of a character's inner feelings is not often found in American comics. I think narrative time corresponds to this.
 I refer to this condition in which chronos time recedes and shifts to kairos time as 'hysterical time'. This involves absorption into subjectively extended timelessness. The pictures in 'Astro Kyudan' (Astro Team) presented as an example above are extreme examples of hysterical time. As I pointed out in the other examples, I think the Japanese highly acclaim this type of representation.
 In recent years, such extreme representations have reduced. Although there is a tendency that the frames are getting gradually larger, at least time flows in a normal way. Ito points out that in the manga 'Black Jack ni yoroshiku' (Best Regards to Black Jack) there is a series of large frames depicting the bust, and though it appears to be an instance of hysterical time at first sight, the story continues at a fair pace. I think the recent technical developments found in this type of narration are remarkable.
 Hysterical time is an imagined timelessness so to speak, and a good way to induce the readers' sympathy. Mangas can be read very quickly because it is possible to generate very intense concentration and absorption through this kind of timeless effect.
 However, on the other hand, I would like to point out here that this might also present a limitation for manga. Firstly, this kind of timelessness leads to rather an excessive sense of 'here and now'. The impact of the 'here and now' is pushed too much to the forefront, and as a result, the narrative and historical aspects tend to be left in the background. This might lead at times to weakness in narrative effect.
 As it is often pointed out, here there is also the problem of the characters' aging. Main characters of manga do not age. We can see this typically in the case of 'Sazaesan', who has hardly aged in 60 years since the end of World War II. The first reason we can think of why it is rather difficult to show the aging of the characters is that most mangas are presented in serials. They have to include topical issues and fashions of the time, and at the same time depict characters who are fundamentally unaffected by such changes. This is made possible by resetting the characters' age every year. In addition, it is difficult to make the characters age since many Japanese mangas tend to have school life as the main theme and the story would end there if the characters go up in school year or graduate. Of course, there are very rare exceptions, such as 'Azumanga daio' (Great King Azumanga) in which the character graduated high school in 3 years and the serial also ended there.
 Another characteristic of Japanese manga is that the enemy fighting the hero gets stronger and stronger. Shonen Jump (Boys' Jump) heads the list in this respect. This is also related to a kind of timelessness. Several ways seem to have been developed to prevent this, but it is difficult to get out of this cycle because simple stories of this kind are quite interesting in their own way. Tezuka has depicted a tournament to decide the world's greatest robot in the episode 'Chijo Saidai no Robotto' (The Greatest Robot on Earth) of 'Tetsuwan Atomu' (Astro Boy), but I heard that he later criticized himself about this particular episode. I think the tendency for the characters' power (especially that of the enemy character) to escalate is not unrelated to the feature of timelessness in manga.
 
Indeterminacy of frames
 Let me now explain the 'indeterminacy of the frames' pointed out by Ito. Manga has frames which are like frames of a film, so to speak. As opposed to cinematic frames which are fixed as single frames as a rule and do not flow horizontally or develop vertically very much, manga frames are drawn on paper and there is always a line-up of several frames. As a result, narratives that are more complex and multi-layered than those of cinema become possible. Herein lies the potentiality of mangas. Frames are very useful for expressing the flow of time. By skipping frames, you can produce an abridged representation, or by not abridging you can create a slow motion effect. For example, in Takano Fumiko's manga, we get the impression that that time is going slowly because the characters' postures do not change, but in fact about 5 hours pass by in between two frames. This is one kind of experiment using the indeterminacy of manga frames. The potential of manga is realized by skillfully using the gap between frames and the pictures drawn in them.
 Frames are truly versatile. We often see in the mangas of Tezuka and Azuma Hideo, for example, the characters hanging on the borders between frames, breaking through the frames or leaning on them. This would be unthinkable in films, unless we are talking about experimental ones.
 Ito points out that the difference between cinema and manga is the latter's repression of pursuit of cinematic reality and realism. Manga is said to apply cinematic grammar, but cinematic reality might be a more restricted form of representation. Cinema can be seen as a more limited kind of representation, since it is constructed through the repression or rejection of the indeterminacy of frames and the unique reality of kyara (a Japanese term coined from English word 'character', translated here as 'character icon') which is far removed from realism.
 The narrative of manga does not occur just inside the frames. Also, as in the case of girls' manga, it purposely avoids using frames in a determinate way. Only manga has the techniques of overlapping layers, creating depth between frames, or doing something tricky like suddenly displaying a narrative covering over two facing pages by employing several layers at once. Unlike cinema, the frames themselves can take on all sorts of meanings and manipulate the context in a versatile manner.
 The importance of manga frames does not just lie in a single frame. The mutual composition of the frames is also important. This is because the reader's vision must be guided by the compositional relationship between frames. One of the obstacles faced by people who cannot read manga is the problem of not knowing how to follow and read the frames. The frame's function of guiding vision, mutual composition of the frames, and the way of placing each frame on a single page are as important as the composition of pictures within the frame. There are also tricky techniques, such as positioning a large frame or inserting a triangular frame; and we can say that the distinctive mode of representation employing such versatile and indeterminate frames is clearly a characteristic unique to manga. But this point seems to be very difficult to comprehend for those who do not understand how this mode of representation functions.
 According to the critic Otsuka Eiji, the characteristic of girls' mangas is the frequent use of monologues. They have speeches in speech balloons, onomatopoeias, mimetic words like ordinary mangas and are the same as boys' manga. But in addition to these, girls' mangas have words, which we do not know to whom they belong, written on the blank part in the background. Sometimes the words are utterances in the mind of the main character, and sometimes they are the author's words; but that must be understood from each context. From this we see that manga is a highly context dependent form of representation. Japanese language is also known to be highly context dependent. In this sense, I think manga is close to characteristics of Japanese linguistic representation.
 There is also the issue of plurality of the camera eye. This too hardly occurs in cinema. We unconsciously identify with the gaze of the camera in the frame of the film. Sometimes we identify with the gaze of the characters and freely switch our perspectives. But manga is much freer than this. A famous example of a cinematic technique developed in manga is the 'technique of identification' said to be created by Tezuka. First, the main character's face is drawn and the scenery is depicted in the next frame. When the scenery is drawn after the main character, the reader naturally interprets that the main character is seeing that scenery. However, the recently reprinted manga of Daijo Noboru uses this technique, so it seems that Tezuka was not the first to employ it. Perhaps we can give Tezuka the historical credit for applying it in the context of a more popular type of representation.
 This technique, however, switches cameras so the change in perspective still appears awkward. Today's manga is more harmonious, and it does not feel out of place even if the scenery and the face of the character seeing it are drawn together in one frame. We can say that this representation in manga is, in a sense, a step beyond cinematic grammar. In psychiatric terminology, identification with the character is called 'imaginary identification' and identification with the camera is known as 'symbolic identification'.
 The frames for narration are not limited to speech balloons. As I mentioned when I discussed girls' manga, manga is a media which is capable of multi-layered representation. Today's manga is much more complex than the simple representation by 'picture + language'. Even within one frame, there are different levels of language such as onomatopoeia, mimetic words, words in speech balloons, monologues, and words written apart from these in some cases. In addition to all these, there is also the level of pictures.
 At the level of the pictures too there is the picture of the main character, the scenes that the character recollects, or pictures of characters from television or manga the character watches or reads. Several levels of time and space are drawn simultaneously in one picture, yet there is no sense of awkwardness. If we try to do this in cinema, we would no doubt be called 'avant-garde'. Cinema is bound by many rules. It is difficult to understand unless it first introduces the genre of the film or what kind of film it is and includes a contextual background about how it will be represented. But if you are familiar with manga, all these sophisticated context markers will be understood quite easily.
 I actually find girls' mangas difficult to read, but people who like them seem to be able to read them quite naturally. So it may be that I simply cannot adjust to the kind of grammar used in girls' manga. Girl's mangas are very complex in terms of multi-layeredness of pictures and languages. The unique world of girls' mangas is probably created by the possibility of putting together and reading in multiple layers.


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