ABSTRACT
While the episodes cited above show that Sazae-san successfully exploited the early postwar issue of women's place in society, it would be going too far to read the comic strip as a call for women's rights or to suggest hat the reason for its popularity lay solely in the image it projected of the modem, liberated woman. Women's liberation was just one of the hot topics of the Occupation years. More important for most Japanese at this time was the struggle for survival. In this sense, too, Sazae-san can be seen as reflective of contemporary society. The concern with finding enough to eat in a period of food shortages, for example, is reflected in the name of the title character herself as well as
Looking back at the early Sazae-san, it is indeed surprising to realize just how many of the strips are devoted to such topics as ration lines, bartering with farmers for food, and the problem of burglars. One strip, for example, depicts Sazae-san and Katsuo on a trip to the countryside to barter for food. Along the way Katsuo's attention is caught by a magician who turns a handkerchief into an apple. "Watch, I can do that too," declares Sazae-san, who then proceeds to show her brother the trick of turning a kimono into a bag of rice (by trading with a farmer).6 In one of the many strips dealing with burglars, Sazae-san and her mother arrive home to find a burglar caught in the "new-style burglar trap" Sazae-san has devised: a ladder, placed over a hidden pit, on which the two women then carry the thief off to the police station. 7
It is in episodes like these, I would suggest, that we see the real appeal of Sazae-san for the early postwar audience. Not only would the audience have recognized in such episodes their own common problems, but also the strip's humor no doubt helped make those problems seem less serious and thus easier to face. If the people were looking for heroes or models for inspiration, then surely the strip provided one in the form of the title character, Sazae-san, whose age and sex spoke of the promise of a new age and whose relentless optimism in the face of hardships held out the hope that things would somehow tum out all right.
