Finally, let me talk about what I have been thinking about recently regards a possible origin of painting. It concerns primitive art, such as wall paintings in Lascaux and Altamira. Animals are depicted in the wall painting of Altamira. There are many interpretations about this. Some say that they were used as magic for hunting, prayer, and so on. When I went into the cave, I saw that the paintings were drawn on the ceiling. I thought that they would be drawn on walls, after all they are called wall paintings. So to be exact, they are Altamira cave ceiling paintings.

 I went there, looked at the ceiling and thought about what they were exactly. I looked at them for about two minutes and realized instinctively that they constituted a constellation. Perhaps it was because by chance just before that I had seen many animals depicted as constellations of Roman or Greek myths drawn on a blue ceiling in a cathedral in Florence.

 When I returned to Japan and asked the Japanese painter Senju Hiroshi about this, he told me that he too had thought that the Altamira paintings were a primitive planetarium. If that was the origin of painting, we can say that painting began with man's observation of the stars. Constellations are named after all kinds of animals, such as Leo, the Great Bear, Aries, and so on. The animals drawn on the ceiling of Altamira are strange too, but anyone looking up at the starry sky would wonder how the constellation of Great Bear is supposed to seem like a great bear. We cannot tell where the head and the tail are, no matter how hard we look. Perhaps in ancient times it was very dark and the sky was bright, so people could see even very weak light. Even today, African people, for instance, have very good eyesight and can see towns and forests even beyond the horizon when walking in the desert. Primitive people probably had very good eyesight too. Well, that is how I thought that constellations are an origin of painting.

 Yoro Takeshi has some very interesting ideas about constellations and myths about constellations. Yoro likes manga very much. He says there were societies that did not have any writing over thousands of years. In those days there were constellations, just a range of dots that did not look like animals at all, in which ancient people saw animals, gods, all sorts of musical instruments, and so on, and discovered stories in them. This was very much related to the development of the brain and could have been one of the most important reasons for human beings to create language.

 Language is of two kinds: written and spoken. Writing came very recently and there were thousands of years before that when human society was without written language and used only spoken language. Yoro argues that if that was the case, from the viewpoint of brain science, the part of the brain controlling writing should have atrophied. But why has the part of the brain controlling writing not atrophied, even though it was not used for thousands of years? That is because people were reading constellations. In other words, he concludes, constellations were the origin of writing.

 I think this is very much related to the origin of manga, Manga has pictures and speech, or sounds like onomatopoeias, or a world where one feels the universe and light. This is very similar to seeing constellations and reading stories into them. Constellations are light in the darkness. Light and darkness create a world. Moreover there is no sound in the world of constellations, but a voice emerges when a story or something is recounted. Thus we can trace the origin of manga to Altamira caves and the period when myths were very rich, and somehow think of it as something more holistic, and beyond individual media such as manga, painting, literature, and so on. I think this kind of thinking is very similar to the structure of manga.

 Although the general theme of today's seminar was Japan, my presentation was about the common origins of human beings beyond a single country or culture. Nevertheless, I think if we really go to the roots of manga, these are the things we should think about. Thank you very much for your kind attention.

　

(Excerpts from the minutes of 'Seminars on Academic Research of Manga and Anime Part 3')

 Relationship between speech balloons, speech, sound and breathing

Fuse: Speech in manga speech balloons are usually written in hiragana (Japanese letters) and kanji (Chinese characters). The kanjis have their readings written in hiragana next to them. This is done not only for difficult kanjis to be easily read. I think it also has to do with the fact that the speeches inside the speech balloons should be sounds. Sound involves breathing and a part of the body. Speech balloons signify functions of the body, such as breathing, voice and sound. I think this is also related to the philosophy of Motoori Norinaga.

 My understanding, albeit rather simplified, is that Motoori Norinaga discusses through his study of Kojiki (Chronicle of Antiquity) the spirituality of ancient Japanese and the Japanese language which was a spoken language. Let me explain. Someone called Hiedanoarei had memorized the whole of the Kojiki. Memorization is done not through written letters but spoken words or voice. He could memorize such a long piece of work, not just because he had a good memory, but also probably because it was done through voice. It is similar to memorizing Buddhist sutras.

 When a book called Kojiki was created, the spoken voice changed to written words. Since then, the power of memory or voice probably became weaker and the power of written words stronger. Motoori Norinaga no doubt had tried to reinstate the power of voice that existed before the birth of writing. This might have been the power of Yamato words or spirit of voice.

 Kobayashi Hideo mentions this in his research on Motoori Norinaga. When Kobayashi wrote about Motoori, he did not try to understand him logically. He just read him over and over again. He read him more than anyone else. Then he began to hear the voice of Motoori Norinaga or of Hiedanoarei. This was not their actual voice but related to the understanding of Motoori Norinaga, Kojiki or Kobayashi Hideo himself.

 In other words, if we can say that transmitting the heart through voice rather than through writing is an aspect of Japanese culture, it seems that manga is like the Kojiki. It has a world of characters and pictures, that is, of voice in the speech balloons, and transmits Japanese culture through combination of these. In the case of Chinese, it might be a world of just pictures and no voice. In a culture of alphabets, it might involve just whatever is inside the speech balloons. Manga culture, which has a good balance between the two, could be said to be characteristic to Japan.

 Moreover, voice is related to breathing. Respiratory organs are very badly formed if we think in terms of human evolution. That is to say, when creatures were in the sea for ten thousands of years, organs such as the heart and circulatory organs existed in water, but respiratory organs were newly formed after they came on to land. It was as if the organs were stuck on in a rush job, so we can say that respiration is rather troublesome in some sense.

 For instance, we cannot stop the heart when we are told to, but we can stop breathing. Breathing as a physiological phenomenon involves controlling the muscles and pulling the diaphragm by will, so when the mind is busy, breathing sometimes does not go smoothly. For example, we feel breathless when we are tense. Being breathless means we are just breathing in. If we keep on breathing in and in, we get breathless. On the other hand, we relax by breathing out. Breathing out involves letting the voice out or laughing. Laughter is one effect of manga that leads to relaxation by letting the breath out.

 In other words, manga culture is not just an aspect of Japanese culture. Its effect of having pictures that breathe and allows you to breathe out is in fact very well made.