1. For housekeeping, Japanese names will be given family name last. I follow whatever romanization system it was I learned in class, with care given to standard practice in fan communities with which I am familiar, and wish to quibble over it about as much as I wish to have a root canal.

2. Learning about manga and anime requires at least a middling education in new terminology. Whenever I use Japanese language terms that are not immediately clear from context, I will provide a translation; however, many terms, like "otaku," "cosplay," and "shojo," have such currency in Western fan circles that providing explanations would be tedious to say the least. But rather than mercilessly throwing the reader to the wind, allow me to recommend both The Anime Web Turnpike and Gilles Poitras' encyclopedic book The Anime Companion as starting points. Either of these will equip the interested reader enough to navigate the Land of the Fan of the Rising Sun with relative ease.

I am grateful to have the opportunity to be the first columnist to cover manga for the Journal. Inasmuch as manga and anime have become something of a phenomenon in the West, arguably Japan's major cultural export since the war, a serious critical analysis grows more and more needed. The vast majority of writing on manga and anime in English has emulated the fan-magazine approach of Japanese publications like Newtype and Animage, which usually just hype new shows and books. (1) And serious English-language analyses -- most notably Frederick Schodt's necessary Manga! Manga! and Dreamland Japan; Matt Thorn's work; Sharon Kinsella's Adult Manga; and Anne Allison's Permitted and Prohibited Desires -- have examined the medium from historical, economic and anthropological perspectives. While I do not wish to ignore the value of these approaches, my primary concern for this column coincides with the arts-first approach of this magazine, pursuing the aesthetics of manga.

The natural point of comparison, of course, is "Euro-comics for Beginners," in my estimation easily the most important regular feature in the Journal for the last few years. Right now, Europe is seething with fine artists and publishers devoted to comics as an art form. However, even though manga has produced artists of equal caliber to their most celebrated Western counterparts -- Yuko Tsuno comes to mind -- as a whole, the situation in Japan is markedly different. Rather than a proliferation of small publishing houses evangelistically devoted to a certain conception of comics-as-art, dozens of larger houses engage in a cutthroat competition for readers. As a medium in the Japanese culture, manga is like a television buzzing in the corner of the room, always on but never fully demanding your attention.

Thus, any column on manga must take great pains to place its specimens in this cultural continuum, (2) to examine the historical and economic factors influencing manga's production, and the differing cultural ideas as to what constitutes Art. This final point perhaps proves the most difficult for Westerners, and the history of 20th century Japanese art has been the story of trying to assimilate Western forms and theories while remaining Japanese, whatever that means. While I have no desire to collapse into cultural relativism, I also do not wish to shoehorn the creative works of a decidedly different culture into possibly narrow Western conceptions of what is and is not Art.

In future articles, I will discuss artists from the current crop of GARO regulars to those as varied as Maki Kusumoto, Yoshiharu Tsuge and Katsuhiro Otomo. Considering that Japanese is much more difficult to learn for English-speakers than the French of Eurocomics, I hope to examine English-language translations as much as possible; however, doing so largely depends on what is translated. I see little point in drubbing the post-Pokémon crowd for being disposable entertainment, but I would relish the opportunity to dig into something meatier, even if the taste ultimately disagrees with me. Of course, doing so depends completely on the publishers.

That all being said, I wish to lay the groundwork for future inquiries into the nature of manga with some cultural analysis, in part as a counterpoint to the picture drawn for most Western fans by a universe of Japanese pop-culture fanzines and products. The framework for doing so comes from a recent trip to Japan, written up in my best schoolboy style. I arrived in Japan in early March 2001 for a two-week stay with two friends. Most of my time was spent eating food, seeing the nigh-infinite procession of temples and shrines and eavesdropping on my hosts Holly and Ian as they went about their daily lives. However, I did manage to track down some observations on manga in rural Japan. Please enjoy.

MY JAPANESE MANGA VACATION

Manga is a Tokyo thing. It's the industry's center, and almost all its artists and publishers reside there. I was 150 miles away, by Mikawa Bay in Aichi Prefecture, staying with two friends who teach English to children in the small towns of Atsumi and Tahara. Everyone there speaks Mikawa-ben, a local dialect, and most of the residents grow flowers or cabbage rather than riding two hours on the train to the office every day. Osamu Tezuka said we were in "the age of comics as air." Around Mikawa, the air's a little thin.

It's not the boondocks, mind: Nagoya, an industrial city of two million people, was a couple hours' drive away, and we puttered from our humble farming communities to the cities of Toyohashi and Hamamatsu. Both equal Cincinnati in size, but to a Japanese would be small towns, whereas I find humble Louisville unmanageably urban. Certainly, each city had its bookstores, its manga shops, but nothing like one would expect, especially if one is an American otaku weaned on Tenchi Muyo who considers Japan a mystical island floating on a sea of magical girls. Not that I am; I'm just a typical curmudgeon writing essays alongside Ken Smith's logos-fetish pieces for The Eros Journal. Or something like that.

A CULTURE OF SIGNS

My arrival began with a crash course in nonlinear travel, riding in Ian's tiny car as he breathlessly navigated the crowded, confusing streets like an expatriate Richard Petty. To keep my nerves, I spent a lot of time gawking out the window at the succession of billboards and their ubiquitous cartoons. When we arrived at our beachfront destination, he pointed out an "Under Construction" sign with a little cop bowing. Even the town festival celebrating the opening of a new shrine had booth after booth with toys and balloons emblazoned with the heads of popular characters. By the time we made it to Coco Ichiban, the Japanese Waffle House, I barely noticed Coco Ichi-Kun on every wall, decked out in clothes identical to those worn in the Midwest's greatest eatery. Ever polite, he still thanked me in the pages of the menu for eating their #1 curry.

Simply put, cartoons are a national obsession. Everywhere in the country, cartoon characters wage a veritable war on our Kantian perceptual apparatus, battering sense organs used to apprehending the minutiae contained in one man's face, or the veritable fractal of greasy detail in a bowl of udon noodles. Cute characters abound, and the cute is so well done it's scary. In fact, Tokyo University lecturer Toshio Okada has claimed, in The Toronto Star no less, that Japan's current contribution to world culture is "cute" as an aesthetic concept. Working for the fanboy animation studio Gainax probably drove him certifiably insane, but he's got a point: relatively few outside of the Swiss academy know Kenzaburo Oe, but everybody loves Hello Kitty. Heck, Sanrio devotes entire stores to its most famous corporate property, and the parade of Kitty merchandise proceeds with such relentlessness as to roundly humiliate Disney's attempts at the same.

As Hello Kitty's gigantic, iconic head can attest, this obsession with cute has produced a refined style of art dedicated to clean lines, a solidity and sharpness of form and bright, flat colors. As is often noted, Japanese art history has provided a fertile ground for the national acceptance of cartooning. Using the distinction Western comics artists make between cartooning and drawing, much of Japanese art qualifies as cartooning. Traditionally, painting in ink has been the favored form. Artists have worked without the constraints of mathematical laws of perspective, and much of the portraiture looks like sophisticated comics. These traditions continued until the influx of Western ideas and techniques at the end of the Edo period, in the mid-19th century.

Holly guided me through this period in Tahara, which has a sizeable museum dedicated to polymath statesman/artist/scientist Kazan Watanabe. "He was the first artist to use Western modeling and perspective," she told me as we examined some hanging scrolls. "Occasionally, his paintings still look cartoony, but his portraiture comes close to photorealism." A fervent progressive, Watanabe eagerly learned what he could from foreign sources, foreshadowing artists like Leonard Foujita, who fully assimilated Western techniques and theories. Nonetheless, all these artists had their roots in a culture that considers an art as simple as writing Chinese characters with a brush to be on an equal level with poetry.

Despite this history, Japan hasn't embraced a calligraphy-influenced aesthetic in comics: Baudoin's work for Kodansha looks odd compared to Japan's national style, which prefers solidity and clearly defined forms. Usually, manga characters translate well to animation because their designs are already composed of clean, flat shapes. Even the cute-brut art of a kids' comic like Crayon Shinchan, at first glance underground and subversive, works great on afternoon television.

Perhaps one reason for this favoritism is the interest in characters as an end in themselves. Snoopy is quite popular, but not from Peanuts. They just love Snoopy himself, and in the Sanrio store he sits stuffed alongside Miffy and Anpanman, whose head is made of bread. Sanrio has given Japan one of its two prime ministers, Hello Kitty. The other is Doraemon, yet this robot cat's career in comics pales next to his skills as a businessman, having stamped his face on every imaginable product. In truth, all the members of this menagerie are just characters -- ideas, really -- with a cornucopia of attendant goods.

[To read the rest of this review, please see The Comics Journal #243.]

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