● Relationship between speech balloon, dialogue, sound and breathing

Fuse: The dialogues inside speech balloons are usually expressed in hiraganas and kanjis and kanjis usually have their hiragana printed beside them. Other than the consideration given to make difficult kanjis readable it also serves the purpose of bringing sound inside the speech balloon. Sound is breathing and it is body. The speech balloon implies the movement of the boy such as breath, voice and sound. I think this is also related to Motoori Norinaga.

 Though it's kind of a rough understanding, he described Japanese language, which was only a spoken language, and the ancient spirituality of Japan through Kojiki's research. Or, from another aspect, this person called Hieda no Arei memorized the entire Kojiki. Memorization is through spoken language and sound and not through characters. Why could he memorize such a long work? It could be because of the sound, in addition to memory power. It's similar to memorizing the Buddhist scriptures.

 When the book called Kojiki came on the scene, voice got replaced by the scripts in Kojiki. Ever since, maybe our memory power and power of voice became weaker and gradually shifted to the power of scripts. That's why Motoori Norinaga advocated the importance of once again restoring the power of voice - it could be the power of ancient Japanese language or the power of words - that existed before scripts were born.

 Hideo Kobayashi touched on this issue in his study on Motoori Norinaga. When he wrote about Motoori, Kobayashi didn't try to understand it logically but just went on reading it many times over. He read more than anyone else did. Then you start hearing voice of Motoori Norinaga or Hieda no Arei in your mind. It's not the real voice, but it leads to the fact that you understand Norinaga Motoori, Kojiki or Hideo Kobayashi. In other words, suppose if we consider conveying the spirit using voice rather than scripts as one stream of the Japanese culture, similar to Kojiki, the media of manga also increasingly seems to be disseminating a stream of Japanese culture with the combination of the worlds created by characters and pictures as well as that of the voice in the speech balloon. If it were Chinese, it may have been the world of pictures alone without voice or if it were a culture based on alphabet, the world may have been limited to the one inside speech balloons. And it may be that the manga culture, which ensures a good balance between these two, is unique to Japan.

 Moreover, voice is related to breathing. From the perspective of evolution of human beings, the respiratory organ is imperfect. That is, the respiratory organ is relatively new as it was developed only after human beings started living on land compared with other organs including the circulatory organ of heart, which already existed while in the sea several hundreds of millions of years. In other words, the respiratory organ was a rush job so to say and in a way breathing is not a simple affair. For example, you can't stop your heart but you can stop breathing. Breathing is the physiologically phenomenon of controlling related muscles and stretching the diaphragm through one's own will. And when your mind is busy, breathing sometimes becomes difficult. For example, we say it's suffocating when we are tensed, and suffocating is the situation where you are only inhaling. If you keep inhaling, you feel suffocated. In order to relax, you need to exhale. Exhaling means to vocalize or laugh. Laughing, which is one of the benefits of manga, would mean exhaling as you laugh and it makes you relaxed.

 In other words, the manga culture, in which breathing is in the pictures and you exhale so many times is not just a stream of the Japanese culture but it's something that's made very well.

　

Tanigawa: It was very interesting. While listening I recalled the fact that Kunio Yanagida, past his 70s, created a textbook for the national language class of primary schools after the war. In the pre-war textbook for first graders it's "Cherry blossoms have bloomed," which we all remember. Yanagida's textbook, however, was very interesting with the first 10 pages or so having no sounds. There are only pictures. After about the first 10 pages, sounds and words start to appear. What was his intention? The basis of Yanagida's ideas is that language activities of human beings is to communicate one's feeling to the counterpart and the most important thing is that you can say what you want to say freely and fully. The most important thing is what kind of statement the child would make while looking at a certain picture.

 In the speech just now, while the theme seemed to be on the language ability of Japanese, we've brought together the role of speech balloons, the dialogues inside the balloons and Kunio Yanagida's Japanese textbook.

 Thank you very much.