Review: Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater and The Art of Osamu Tezuka
Two recent art book releases from Abrams wrap beautiful fantasy images within the history of post-war Japan and the popular culture that mended the wounds of World War II.
Eric P. Nash’s “Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater” is a fascinating archeology of a lost form of entertainment that dominated Japan from the 1930s to the early 1960s — well-remembered in its country of origin but entirely unknown anywhere else.
Kamishibai was a form of public storytelling that utilized printed artwork in the action. Imagine someone pulling out the illustrations of a children’s book and acting out the narrative before a live audience, and that’s essentially what kamishibai was. The form was so influential that at times of war — and occupation — it was steered by official bodies for propaganda purposes, since it was a reliable way of reaching a massive audience of citizens as well as children.
The storytelling is gone with the decades, but what we have left is the astonishing artwork that embellished the words, and Nash’s book does an absolutely beautiful job at presenting this material.
Complete stories are contained in the book, ranging from the over-the-top adventures of the Golden Bat to the jarring Hiroshima examination “Pledge of Peace from Children of the Bomb,” and just about any genre or tone between the two. Much of the art is breathtaking and filled with the sort of pluck that such lively theater must have demanded in order to compete with the storytellers.
The real testament to the enormity of influence that kamishibai had in Japanese culture is demonstrated by the fact that television, when it first appeared in the country, was referred to as “denki kamishibai,” which translates into “electric paper theater.”
At first viewed as merely another form of the visual street theater format, television put the final nail in the form’s coffin — ironically — by debuting “Astro Boy” on Jan. 1, 1963. “Astro Boy” was not only an animated show aimed at kids, but also was one that through its limited animation techniques literally became “electric paper theater” and stood tall as the technological ancestor of the kamishibai. And much like kamishibai, it would dominate Japanese popular culture alongside the children of the form, manga and anime.
As a compliment to this, Abrams has also given lavish treatment to artist/animator Osamu Tezuka, who has recently seen a bit of a revival thanks to the new film version of his creation Astro Boy.
Helen McCarthy’s book — with its no nonsense text — serves as a great introduction to Tezuka’s work, functioning as not only a biography and art book, but also an encyclopedia of his characters and works. Going through each decade, McCarthy explains Tezuka’s practice of using a fictional cast that would recur in his stories, outlining each player, as well as analyzing every Manga release and character in the Tezuka universe.
Tezuka’s clean and cartoonish art styles — which inspired generations of Japanese and American illustrators — were well-serviced by his thematically rich science fiction stories. Often writing for children, and especially young girls, Tezuka would bring the harsh lessons of wartime Japan into his stories, as well as examinations of the confidence of youth and what it means to be human. Given the era in which he began such work — the late 1940s — Tezuka was championing not only an illustration and storytelling style, but also an entire progressive outlook for children’s comics.
In McCarthy’s book — which is accompanied by a documentary DVD — just about every title the man ever released is represented visually, giving an indication of the evolution and breadth of his work.
Japanese culture has seeped into America increasingly over the last couple decades, to such a degree that it practically defines the entertainment most our kids seek out — especially girls, for whom Manga is one of the biggest literary forms. These two releases from Abrams serve the interested well, not only as documents of beautiful art from Japan’s popular culture, but also as road maps to the past of what has now become American culture as well.
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