By the late Tokugawa period, what I have mentioned above was intensified and European culture was introduced. Modern European media first arrived in Yokohama. In 1859, a port was opened by reclaiming land from the sea. A foreign settlement was constructed separated by small canals. The area inside the entrance of that barrier was called Kannai which still remains today as a place name. This foreign settlement was moved to Tsukiji in Tokyo where Japanese and European hybrid culture emerged.

 Hiroshige III was one of the ukiyoe painters who depicted the period of change in civilization in Yokohama and Tsukiji. He became famous for his so-called 'pictures of the enlightenment'. Gaslights, telegraph, railway, barber shop, photography shop, western style horse racing, ice cream, sukiyaki restaurant, milk shop were all unusual. Hiroshige III published Ryusai Manga by taking up his pen name, in which he depicted scenes of Meiji civilization in ukiyoe style, representing the atmosphere of the time through columns and combinations of several pictures.

 Nishikie newspapers (color woodblock prints) depicted the atmosphere of the time through pictures. Printed newspapers imitating English newspapers appeared at the end of the Tokugawa period and the beginning of the Meiji period, but the readership was limited since they were translated texts using a lot of kanji with no kana renderings. At that time, kanji was considered to be men's letters and kana women's letters, so newspapers were not read by women. Then nishikie newspapers appeared. They were based on pictures of news printed with wooden blocks using the same technology as ukiyoe and represented the first kind of popular journalism in Japan.

 In 1874, Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun appeared on the market. The top news on its front page was illustrated by a nishikie. Yubinhochi Shinbun was published as its competitor, becoming enormously popular due to the illustrations by the last ukiyoe genius, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi. The nishikie on the front page of these newspapers took up accidents, sad and happy stories occurring in the lives of ordinary people and depicted the changes of the period from the point of view of the masses. From around 1881, however, these nishikie newspapers came to be replaced by small newspapers that used to their advantage the speed of information processing by printing kana renderings for all the kanji.

 Punch pictures were introduced in contrast to the above traditional Japanese representations of current affairs. Charles Wirgman was a correspondent of the London Illustrated News. He drew illustrations of events in Japan, attached articles to them and distributed the news. Wirgman caricaturized funny incidents triggered off by encounters and cultural differences between Japanese and Europeans in Yokohama and published them in an illustrated magazine called Japan Punch. This became a great hit and it was said that foreigners visiting Japan would not understand Japan unless they read it.

 Japan Punch included caricatures, methods of assembling machines, elephants performing funny acrobats, and so on. The illustrations were drawn instantly with a pen and represented comically and humorously. The word 'punch' in Japan Punch became ponchi and ponchi pictures in Japanese. All kinds of ponchi pictures were circulated. These included sarcastic, critical and satirical representations of manners and customs, recreation, and day to day life of the masses in the period of Meiji Restoration that combined Japanese and Western lifestyles. Simplified pictures of unknown machines and buildings were also presented.

 Ponchi pictures became popular through Kiyochika Ponchi and other magazines having punned versions of the same title, in which Kobayashi Kiyochika, one of Wirgman's disciples, caricaturized comical lifestyles of the civilization and enlightenment period. Ponchi pictures were drawn on a popular board game sugoroku called 'Punch Vocabulary Foreigners and Japanese in Japan' teaching the players the differences between cultures of east and west. In 1874, Kawanabe Kyosai and Kanagaki Robun published the magazine Pictorial News Japonchi imitating Japan Punch.

 Japonchi was a pun and parody of Japan Punch. Ponchi pictures developed into manga. Title of Japonchi was inherited by Nipponchi published as a special issue of Fuzokugaho (Pictorial Magazine of Customs) in 1889. This was an entertainment magazine that included ponchi pictures, senryu (comic haiku), dodoitsu (popular songs), parody songs, short stories, as well as critiques of current events. Here the idea of ponchi brought together the sense of fun and style that existed since the Edo period.

 Let me give an example of a ponchi picture that made fun of worldly life and news. In Nipponchi which was started in January 1906, there were 30 episodes of 3 frame ponchi pictures called 'The Great Buttock Flesh Sale'. This was based on an incident in 1902 when a boy was killed in Kojimachi, Tokyo, and his buttock flesh was cut off. The suspect was arrested 3 years later and the incident took a bizarre turn as a case of sale of human flesh. In the 3 frame ponchi picture which parodies this incident, a female student says, 'I have a lot of flesh on my buttock so I want to sell it.' When customers come, a quack says, 'That will be 1000 yen for 100 grams' and sells it. When the flesh of the girl student's buttock disappears, he adds a pig's buttock. Then the girl student's buttock becomes covered with hair and grows a tail. How strange? Thus it makes fun of the commotion over the sale of human flesh.

 In the Meiji period, many manga-like phenomena appeared apart from nishikie and ponchi pictures. These were combined and developed into manga. Professional manga artists appeared from about the beginning of the twentieth century and led to the growth of contemporary manga. Japanese mangas today deal not only with critiques and humor, but also ideals, wars, struggles, the state, love, hope, effort, life and death, misery, sex, intrigues, laughter, mystery, gangsters, conflicting views, horror, wit, taboo, nonsense, and so on. They have become media for most knowledge that is not taught at school. They have been called manga internationally. They are full of sensibility that differ from comics of the English speaking world and bande dessinée of the French speaking world, and occupy a unique sphere of knowledge. I would like to end this presentation by pointing out that this is an indication that the 'manga-like phenomena' in Japan continue today as they developed techniques of visual information editing over a long period of time and continued to cover knowledge that tended to be excluded by social systems.