ABSTRACT

This edited collection explores how graphic art and in particular Japanese manga represent Japanese history.

The articles explore the representation of history in manga from disciplines that include such diverse fields as literary studies, politics, history, cultural studies, linguistics, narratology, and semiotics. Despite this diversity of approaches all academics from these respective fields of study agree that manga pose a peculiarly contemporary appeal that transcends the limitation imposed by traditional approaches to the study and teaching of history. The representation of history via manga in Japan has a long and controversial historiographical dimension. Thereby manga and by extension graphic art in Japanese culture has become one of the world’s most powerful modes of expressing contemporary historical verisimilitude. The contributors to this volume elaborate how manga and by extension graphic art rewrites, reinvents and re-imagines the historicity and dialectic of bygone epochs in postwar and contemporary Japan.

Manga and the Representation of Japanese History will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian studies, Asian history, Japanese culture and society, as well as art and visual culture

chapter |17 pages

Introduction

The representation of Japanese history in manga

chapter |22 pages

Sabotaging the rising sun

Representing history in Tezuka Osamu's Phoenix

chapter |20 pages

Reading Shōwa history through manga

Astro Boy as the avatar of postwar Japanese culture

chapter |21 pages

Representations of gendered violence in manga

The case of enforced military prostitution

chapter |21 pages

Maruo Suehiro's Planet of the Jap

Revanchist fantasy or war critique? 1

chapter |19 pages

Making history herstory

Nelson's son and Siebold's daughter in Japanese shōjo manga

chapter |25 pages

Heroes and villains

Manchukuo in Yasuhiko Yoshikazu's Rainbow Trotsky

chapter |25 pages

Making history

Manga between kyara and historiography

chapter |28 pages

‘Land of kami, land of the dead'

Paligenesis and the aesthetics of religious revisionism in Kobayashi Yoshinori's ‘Neo-Gōmanist Manifesto: On Yasukuni’

chapter |17 pages

Hating Korea, hating the media

Manga Kenkanryū and the graphical (mis-)representation of Japanese history in the Internet age

chapter |17 pages

The adaptation of Chinese history into Japanese popular culture

A study of Japanese manga, animated series and video games based on The Romance of the Three Kingdoms

chapter |8 pages

Towards a summation

How do manga represent history?