Jaqueline Berndt

Reflections: Writing Comics into Art History in Contemporary Japan

In  Japanese publisher Shogakukan completed a collection of lavishly illustrated coffeetable books on Japan’s art history (Nihon bijutsu zenshū). Each of the  hard-cover and boxed volumes in B size contains more than  mostly full-page color images. While collections like these are a well-established Japanese tradition dating back to the early s, the new edition proves to be exceptional in a number of regards. In addition to the volumes on Japanese Art in East Asia (vol. ) and War and Art (vol. ), it stands out for the inclusion of manga, as comics are called in Japanese (Fig. ). Volume , which covers the period from  to , features eight manga works in its main part: two double-spreads of Tezuka Osamu’s pioneering graphic narrative The New Treasure Island (Shintakarajima, ; with Sakai Shichima), one pre-print page consisting of six panels from Mizuki Shigeru’s Kitarō of the Graveyard (Hakaba no Kitarō, ), one double-spread with eleven panels from Shirato Sanpei’s The Legend of Kamui (Kamui-den, ; original ink-drawing with typed dialogue lines pasted into the balloons), one frontispiece page with title and two panels from Akatsuka Fujio’s gag manga series Tensai Bakabon (), two panels from one of Tanioka Yasuji’s nonsense manga (Yasuji no mettametagaki dōkōza, ), singleimage illustrations by Nagai Gō (Devilman, –) and George Akiyama (Ashura, –) as well as the watercolor picture by Miyazaki Hayao which adorned the cover of volume  of his manga Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind (Kaze no tani no Naushika, ). The editor in charge was Sawaragi Noi, an art critic who had made a name for himself in Japan around , mainly by revisioning modern Japanese art from the perspective of Murakami Takashi and others’ Neo-Pop. Due to this focal point, he had also been taking popular forms of visual art into account. With respect to the recent coffeetable book, Sawaragi explicates that “we included manga works in the color illustrations of this volume to an extent beyond comparison with any other collected edition of Japanese art so far”, framing this with the