Emil Hoelter

Dr. Richard

Practicum I

Feb. 26^th, 2003

Cultural Legitimacy and What Manga and Emakimono Mean to Each Other

It is nearly impossible to look at modern Japanese culture without looking at manga and anime. Their omnipresence in Japan far exceeds foreign forms of animation and comic books, an issue that many attribute to the broad range of styles and thematic material dealt with by Japanese authors. Seemingly every sort of genre is translated in illustrated narrative, and demographic targeted is not specifically young males, as has been the case in America, but rather children and adults, of both genders. With the increase in popularity of Japanese manga and anime in America, non-Japanese scholars have begun serious academic research on the themes and techniques present in these forms. Likewise, the international success of manga and anime has raised a question of the cultural and political identification of these works. While they are clearly Japanese, in that we can trace their publication histories back to Japan, they are generally not regarded by scholars of Japanese culture particularly literary and thus not especially relevant as topics of study. However, a different argument about the pedigree of manga and anime does seem to raise them to the level of literary works. Recently, within the last decade, a number of Japanese scholars have put forth works suggesting that manga and anime are related to emakimono, and through it to Japanese art history.

While Tsuji's essay is briefer than Takahata's book, it is more telling with regard to the complex intercultural influences on this debate. Tsuji begins with a quote by Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein that "the principle of montage can be identified as the basic element of modern Japanese culture" (Tsuji 53). The logic behind this statement, according to Eisenstein, is that because the Japanese kanji system of writing utilizes several character radicals, each with a symbolic meaning, in combination to create words, and these words are read by Japanese readers by inputting all of the component radicals of one kanji simultaneously to form another meaning, and I might add that further since kanji can be read in many ways depending on context and are frequently combined with other, equally complex kanji to form compound words, Japanese people are accustomed to receiving information in a sort of elaborate, but grammatical, system of pictures. Eisenstein's quotation comes from an essay entitled "The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram", so we must consider that when he said this, he was focusing on a different legitimization: the legitimization of film as a valid medium. He was not especially concerned with Japanese film, nor at all with manga or emakimono but instead in using the Japanese writing system, identified as having a tradition long enough to make it infallibly significant, as a metaphor for film. Tsuji's appropriation of this quotation is brief, as he segues into modern scholars' works on emakimono and manga--including Takahata's--but it is his incorporation of Eisenstein that is most interesting. After the quote he says "[a] more explicit connection between pre-modern Japanese pictorial arts was suggested in…" and prior to it he paraphrases Eisenstein to say "As Japanese ways of reading and viewing pictures have been conditioned by an ideographic writing system…" (Tsuji 53). Eisenstein, as far as I know, did not speak Japanese nor was especially knowledgeable about Japanese culture, but saw in the Japanese language a metaphor for the way in which film constituted less a form of entertainment (which would make it simply popular culture) and more a part of "representational culture" with a specific pedigree: Japanese ideograms. But Tsuji uses this very Western appropriation of Japanese culture, reinserted into Japanese cultural scholarship, to give us a double legitimization of the manga/emakimono debate: we must accept emakimono as a valid ancestor because their drawing system was "conditioned" by written Japanese, and we must accept written Japanese as a valid ancestor because noted Russian director Sergei Eisenstein has used it to justify film which, in a circuitous fashion, since it has become one of the primary methods of expression in modern society, gives value to written Japanese, now a symbol for film instead of vice versa.

Thus the discussion of manga and emakimono as part of Japanese culture embraces a number of cultural topics, but ultimately very few of them have anything specifically to do with either emakimono or manga. The two are of course related insofar as they are both styles of illustrated narrative that come from Japan. However, while early emakimono are praised by Tsuji for "the way in which they experiment with the stylistic and functional possibilities of the format" ("[T]he format" being painting? Or perhaps narrative? Tsuji does not clarify), he notes that later emakimono were "limited" in "the treatment of time" in this fashion:

At this point it should be noted that Tsuji himself does not outline specific anime or manga which he feels are representative of these traditional Japanese modes of viewing--he only refers to Otomo Katsuhiro's Akira in passing, as one scene bears an "uncanny resemblance" to an illustration in Ryutei Tanehiko's 17^th-century Kinsei Kaidan shimoyo no hoshi (Modern Ghost Tales: Stars on a Frosty Night). Outside of this reference, made at the end of his paper, there are no manga works examined in detail, and given the previous quotation about the "didactic" and "restrict[ive]" nature of "clearly divided scenes" in later emakimono, we might question what exactly it is about manga that Tsuji and other scholars see as representational of classical Japanese art, Japanese modes of viewing, representations of space and time, or any other field of comparison. While Takahata's book, published by the same studio where he makes anime, is most likely aimed at existing fans of Studio Ghibli animation with the purpose of piquing their interest in classical Japanese culture (or perhaps arming them against the critiques of their professors that manga is not serious enough to be considered scholarly), it does not convincingly fit anime into an emakimono mold, rather it attempts to make emakimono fit an anime mold. Likewise, as Tsuji's essay is entitled "Early Medieval Picture Scrolls as Ancestors of Anime and Manga," but not more than one sentence even mentions a particular manga that can be considered a corollary, it seems to me that really Tsuji is trying to legitimize emakimono, not manga or anime, as a form of text worth a look by modern viewers. Semantically, Tsuji made this clear at the start; had he called his essay "Anime and Manga as Descendants of Early Medieval Picture Scrolls," perhaps the focus would have been different.

This leads to the connection I see between manga and emakimono, which requires us to look at specifically what is being validated, not assess the effectiveness of the validation itself. Both Tsuji and Takahata, like non-Japanese fans of anime and manga, are beginning their arguments with an implicit assumption: anime and manga are so influential in modern Japanese culture that any understanding of Japanese culture in general should be filtered through them. If we accept this, then we can use emakimono to plug manga and anime into a discourse of Japanese "representational culture", which if effectively proven would require those who consider manga and anime unliterary to reassess them as artistic and historical, and by discussing all the works as part of a Japanese pattern of "illustrated narrative", we can suggest their understanding as works of art is secondary to their understanding as works of literature. Which is as it should be, because emakimono were not considered works of art in the first place! At least, not in the sense in which works of art are displayed for public viewing. Rather, they were scrolled stories that were read privately, and only by surviving through the years have the remaining emakimono come to find themselves hung on museum walls and viewed as closer to paintings than to comic books. Will the same thing happen to manga, centuries from now? The importance of the question is that it recontextualizes emakimono as products of popular culture, albeit a popular culture that has long since ceased to exist. Perhaps this is what Takahata and Tsuji were striving for after all.

So then the question of whether or not manga and emakimono are related is part of the discourse on whether or not popular culture should be accepted as scholarly, the common understanding being that works can become "classics" if they "stand the test of time", as my high school English teacher would say. What separates manga and emakimono, in this context, is not cultural heritage or national identity or social valuation, only time. Ironically, it is the treatment of time that Tsuji emphasizes as emakimono's contribution to manga in his essay.

It is not only time as represented in the drawings themselves that Tsuji discusses. Also, because the handscroll was read privately, "[t]he pace of viewing, and therefore the unfolding of narrative time, was entirely in the viewer's control" (Tsuji 56). This is, more so than any technical element of emakimono, what is important about Tsuji's understanding of "modes of viewing". The focus is not on what the emakimono is by itself, but rather on what it is in the hands of the reader. Hence emakimono is recontextualized for us in a way that we can relate to, one which makes it akin to manga and anime, but also written fiction and live-action films. We, as viewers/readers, are in control of the texts, when we become aware that since we can read them at whatever pace we choose, and draw whatever conclusions we want, we are ultimately the active controllers in what we are reading. There it is. Having trudged through this debate, we are left to wonder is this all there was to it? Manga and emakimono are related in that we read them both?

That's it?

Yes, but this is precisely the point. Manga and emakimono are, as two elements of Japanese culture, the unwilling competitors in a struggle for literary authority, as enacted by both scholars and fans. But it is we who, in writing about manga and emakimono as related texts have legitimized this connection, without even realizing it. The point at which we began to look at manga and emakimono as potentially related was the point at which they became related. The reason for this is simply that we related them, by including them in the same work as subjects of scrutiny. Realizing this, we can go back and realize why it is that Takahata and Tsuji did not need to list any specific manga or anime in their papers: it doesn't matter. This is not an argument about whether the lines used to represent a human in emakimono and the lines used to represent a human in manga are related in some abstract historical way. The emphasis on that belies the cultural implications of the struggle for authority. Manga must be asserted as Japanese to the scholarly world, but in this case "Japanese" carries the implication not of modern Japan, but of classical Japan. The only reason specific emakimono were included is because the readers really don't know what emakimono is; once we know this, we can treat particular scrolls with the same disregard we would particular comics. Our discussion is about more than Shigisan engi emaki or Tezuka Osamu's Hi no Tori, it is about whether one system can be used justify another, and ultimately that yes, they can, because they are both systems. Manga and emakimono are both "illustrated narratives", texts which convey a story through illustration. But their connection need be no more concrete than the one Eisenstein saw between Japanese ideograms and cinema. Their validation exists in our apprehension of them, and the moment when we read them as related products is the moment when they become, in the hands of their readers, related.

Tsuji Nobuo, "Early Medieval Picture Scrolls as Ancestors of Anime and Manga" (Translated by Meri Arichi; edited and adapted by John T. Carpenter)