The Inked Pages of Japan: A History of Manga
From ancient scrolls to post-war comic creations, the origins of manga have existed in Japan since far before their modern publications.
While riding Japan’s rush-hour trains, weaving through its crowded streets, or jostling into hushed elevators, you’ll see the familiar sight of faces immersed in thick volumes of books or cast in the digital glow of phone screens. However, when a page furls or a phone tilts in your direction, you might be offered a glimpse, not into a novel or a social media feed, but into a monochromatic world of art and fantasy known as manga.
Manga is a quotidian part of life in Japan. Here, no single demographic can encapsulate its audience: from elementary school students huddled around a single volume to the smartphone-equipped elders reading digital manga on park benches. Its range of genres and capacity for nuanced maturity have stripped away the juvenile connotations that comic books often carry and turned manga into a national pastime. However, “modern manga,” which most are familiar with today, emerged in the mid-20th century and represents only the most recent chapter in its near-millennia-long history.
The earliest form of manga is said to have been sketched by a 12th-century monk in the final decades of the Heian period (794–1185)—Japan’s “cultural golden age.” These scrolls were preserved as monastic artifacts for centuries in Kozan-ji Temple, Kyoto, before being reintroduced to the public during the Meiji period (1868–1912) as a part of efforts to reaffirm Japan’s cultural identity in a rapidly modernising world. In the mid-20th century, they were codified as national treasures, just as the Manga Revolution was defining modern manga.
As manga grew into an industry of its own, these scrolls became a contentious part of its story, championed by some as proof that manga is the oldest form of comic book in the world, while dismissed by others—including Studio Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata—as bearing little resemblance to the modern manga industry, instead pointing to other scrolls of the period, the import of 18th-century European comic strips, or the influence of modern Western comic books as the catalyst for modern manga.
Whether manga was inked by 12th-century Japanese monks or inspired by 18th-century European artists, whether its success is bound in Japanese cultural preservation or Western cultural assimilation, manga’s stylistic idiosyncrasies, from its doe-eyed characters to its dynamic use of emanata, have made it one of the most defining pieces of modern Japanese pop culture.
The “First Manga”
Google the origins of manga and you’ll find references to the Choju-jinbutsu-giga, or “the scrolls of frolicking animals.” These are a set of 12th- and 13th-century emakimono scrolls, attributed to the artist and Buddhist monk, Toba Sojo (1053–1140). The Choju-jinbutsu-giga depict monks as anthropomorphized animals, such as frogs, rabbits, and monkeys, engaging in distinctly human activities: bathing, wrestling, and performing the daily practices of Buddhist monks. More than just cartoon-like sketches, Sojo’s scrolls offer a satirical critique of the moral decay of Japan’s 12th-century Buddhist monasteries, which preached ascetic and virtuous ideals, but wielded increasing religious and political influence over Japanese society.
Imported from China in the 6th century, Buddhism was welcomed by Japan’s imperial aristocracy, but its spread among the common people was impeded by the belief in Japan’s native religion, Shintoism. From the 8th to 12th centuries, as Shinto and Buddhist practices gradually melded, large Buddhist monasteries were built around Japan’s shifting capitals of Nara (710), Nagaoka (784), and Kyoto (794). In doing so, Buddhist institutions amassed significant political and religious power, able to dominate technological innovations, such as woodblock printing, which was restricted to monastic use in Buddhist seals and images for centuries.
During the Heian period (794–1185), Buddhist institutions used their influence to reinforce the waning power of Japan’s aristocracy who, in turn, bolstered the monasteries’ power through the continued assimilation of Buddhist and Shinto practices. By the start of the Kamakura period (1185–1333), as Japan became a shogunate led by a hereditary series of samurai and military dictators, the first shoguns were able to seize and maintain control by wielding the illusory power of these monasteries and plunging Japan into generations of war and social upheaval.
Therefore, the cartoon-like illustrations in the Choju-jinbutsu-giga may seem like simple depictions of animals chasing away thieves or whiling away days bathing, but they actually provide an astute critique of the hypocrisy and apathy of religious institutions in a nation on the brink of fundamental change. Sojo’s scrolls unwittingly set a precedent for manga to be used as a cultural canvas on which to capture the shifting socio-political trends of their day, and while the term “manga” would not enter popular use for another six centuries, and these scrolls would not be recognized as manga for two centuries after that, historians argue the continuity of satirical critique, artistic style, and visual storytelling places these scrolls within the broader canon of manga.
Early Sketches: The Outline of Manga in the Modern Era
The resignation of the last shogun marked the end of the Edo period (1603–1867), an era of political stability, economic growth, and cultural flourishing not seen since the Heian period. By the end of Edo, Japan’s population had doubled to roughly 30 million; it achieved one of the highest literacy rates in the pre-modern world; and the widespread adoption of woodblock printing by the broader public provided a form of mass production on par with Europe’s printing press. Woodblock printing marked one of the most significant advancements in manga’s history since the Choju-jinbutsu-giga, leading to the creation and popularisation of the term “manga,” thanks in large part to one of Japan’s most prolific and recognisable artists, Katsushika Hokusai.
The democratisation of woodblock printing meant that hand-painted emakimono scrolls—which had been a hallmark of Japanese art for centuries, but were only accessible to the scholars, samurai, and elites who commissioned them—found new competition from ukiyo-e, which could be easily recreated and mass-produced. For the first time, common people became both the subjects and collectors of art, and, during the late 18th century, Toba-e (Toba-style drawings) was a specific style of ukiyo-e that gained popularity.
Toba Sojo’s work was reproduced and imitated en masse, bound in collected anthologies, and sold to the public, creating one of Japan’s first widely accessible forms of popular visual culture, reviving his nuanced use of satire and sketch-like illustrations in the process. By the turn of the 19th century, anthologies of a new art form were being sold, dubbed “manga” (漫 man “loose” 画 ga “drawings,” i.e., “sketches”) because of their simple, adumbrated sketches, and these books provided the foundations for the manga magazines and comic book publications that followed.
The first published use of the term “manga” is believed to have been in Shiji no yukikai (1789), a picture book by ukiyo-e artist Santo Kyoden. Its pages were filled with sketches of passersby outside his house, and Kyoden achieved an unprecedented degree of success, selling up to 10,000 copies of some books, unheard of in contemporary Japan.
Despite this, his contributions have been overshadowed by Katsushika Hokusai, who is credited with popularising the term “manga” with his Hokusai’s Manga (1814), an anthology of over 4,000 candid sketches of everyday life in Japan. While both of these works are placed in the manga canon by historians, modern audiences may not draw a direct connection because artists from Sojo to Hokusai predominantly used synoptic narratives, containing whole stories within a single image, rather than the sequential narratives of modern manga. It would not be until the comic strip, a novel European import, that panelled storytelling was first adopted in Japan, and with it, the first mangaka (manga professional or specialist) were born.
The First Generation of Mangaka
Just four years after Hokusai’s death, Japan’s 214-year period of isolation (1639-1853) came to an end, sparking a flurry of previously restricted trade and cultural exchange. As early European merchants set sail for Japanese shores, they brought with them new forms of popular culture like comic strips and political cartoons. Although their jokes were lost in translation, and they referenced politics a world away, their use of visual humour was innately familiar to Japanese audiences.
Their stylistic innovations were quickly adopted by Japanese artists, namely the use of panelled, sequential narratives (pioneered by Swiss artist and the so-called “father of comics," Rodolphe Töpffer, 1799–1846); the invention of speech bubbles, a by-product of the gramophone (1887), first used in the American comic strip “The Yellow Kid” (1895); and the concept of the cartoon-dedicated magazine itself, inspired by England’s satirical magazine Punch (1841), the first influential cartooning magazine. By the 1920s, these had become staples in cartooning around the world, while in Japan, the first generation of mangaka were beginning to emerge.
As Yokohama’s harbor became a hub for international trade, it was a fitting home for Japan Punch (1862), a Japanese iteration of the satirical British publication. Although it was written in English, it resonated with Japanese audiences and the term ponchi-e (“Punch pictures”) began to be widely used for the art of cartooning as a whole. Soon, Japanese illustrators began producing imitations such as Eshinbun Nipponchi (1874), considered by many to be the first Japanese manga magazine. Though it didn’t match the popularity of Japan Punch, lasting only three issues, it did open the door to Japanese-owned cartooning magazines, and after a generation of similar publications with varying degrees of popularity, Shonen Sekai ("Youth's World", 1895), became Japan’s first shonen magazine, and one of the first to achieve widespread success, followed a decade later by Shojo Sekai ("Girls' World", 1906), Japan’s first shojo magazine.
While these early publications took initial inspiration from the West, they were becoming increasingly distinct from their European contemporaries, further cemented by the first generation of mangaka. Rakuten Kitazawa’s Jiji Manga (1902) set a precedent as the first self-described manga magazine printed entirely in Japanese. Manga magazines gained popularity as others joined Kitazawa, including Noboru Oshiro and Suiho Tagawa, experimenting with more complex themes and forms of storytelling, and Japan’s introduction of serialized magazines. Less limited by the constraints of short-form Western comic strips, by the 1930s, manga had embraced multi-page stories with character depth and recurring themes.
As early manga took great inspiration from Japanese folklore, culture, and traditions, one popular theme that dominated early publications was militarism. Nationalistic imagery associated with Imperial Japan was particularly common in the male-focused shonen manga, which only intensified as Japan entered the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945).
War and the Manga Revolution
War has always been tenuously linked to the history of comic books. From the 11th-century Bayeux tapestry, a 70-metre cloth detailing the Norman conquest of England—argued to be the origin of Western comics as the Choju-jinbutsu-giga are for manga—to the propagandised characters of Superman and Captain America being used to fight America’s wars from the racks of local comic book stands. Here, manga was no exception. Shonen Sekai heavily featured the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), and Japan’s first manga-magazine boom coincided with the start of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). But, it was the Second World War that reshaped Japanese pop culture as a whole. Takashi Murakami, a manga-inspired artist famous for his use of cute, brightly coloured characters, highlights that Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, and the devastation of the atomic bombs, wiped out the nationalism and militaristic imagery of pre-war manga, replacing it with the cute, innocuous aesthetic of modern manga. Along with this cute veneer, superhero comic books that were brought by troops during the American occupation inspired storylines with more heroic and superpowered protagonists. As Japan was caught between the crossroads of its pre-war identity and post-war reality, one artist who embraced this dichotomy was Osamu Tezuka, widely recognised as the “God of Manga” and the man credited with almost single-handedly sparking the Manga Revolution (1945–1960).
Born in 1928, Tezuka was immersed in the Americana of Disney movies and superhero comic books, while also growing up with the works of Japan’s early mangakas. As a result, Tezuka’s manga melded the themes and aesthetics of both worlds and the unique visual qualities that, at first, distinguished his work from others, became defining features of modern manga, such as the use of large, emotive “anime” eyes, inspired by one of his favorite movies, Bambi (1942). In 1952, the same year the Choju-jinbutsu-giga was recognised as a national treasure, Tezuka’s Tetsuwan Atom (Astro Boy) was first published. It became Japan’s first highly successful story-driven manga and helped cement manga as a medium of long-form narratives and profound emotional stakes, far removed from the short-form comic strips of the 18th century. By the 1960s, manga was seen, both domestically and internationally, as a distinct Japanese medium, increasingly devoid of direct Western influences, and in 1963, Astro Boy further distinguished Japanese pop culture by becoming the first domestically produced anime series, establishing the now inseparable relationship between manga and animation.
While manga retained a docile, cute aesthetic, genres expanded to include the more mature seinen (“young men’s”) and josei ("women's"), and the young adult became a central figure in Japan’s development. Youth alienation led to the largest popular protests in Japan’s history and waves of delinquency brought the country to the brink of social upheaval. Once again, just as Toba Sojo had done in the 12th century, manga became a canvas to explore this disharmony.
Modern Manga
From the late 1950s through the 1970s, waves of protests rocked Japan as the spectre of American occupation still haunted the country, and the post-war concession to demilitarize eroded what was left of its imperialistic self-image. In this vacuum of authority, youth delinquency became a central issue, and the popular culture of the time reflected this. Tsuppari (from tsupparu, “to defy”) became manga’s archetypal delinquent character and, despite their pernicious presence in society, these characters made for popular reading. Be-Bop High School (1983) became one of the best-selling manga of its day, a series about violence-prone high schoolers in ill-fitting gakuran jackets—a uniform of its own for the rebellious youth.
During this time, Katsuhiro Otomo, an artist who had already made a name for himself in manga’s New Wave movement of the 1970s, began working on a new project with the intent to capture the alienation among Japanese youth. Otomo’s AKIRA (1982), a cyberpunk take on post-war Japan, depicted a nation still grappling with its past, insecure about its present, and apathetic for its future. It didn’t just articulate youth tension, represented by the wayward biker gangs that roamed Tokyo, it also explored government inefficiency, religious corruption, and the old-fashioned militarism that still had a stranglehold on Japan.
AKIRA struck a chord with both domestic and international readers, and catapulted manga onto the world stage as one of the first complete manga series to be translated into English—distributed in the West by Epic Comics, an imprint of Marvel Comics. It was followed by a critically acclaimed animated adaptation, which gave anime its first major international success as audiences around the world were gripped by this introduction into the unique creative flair of Japanese pop culture.
As the 1980s progressed, youth protest movements lost momentum, and the national malaise that led to youth delinquency was replaced by an optimistic culture of consumerism and individualism, fueled by Japan's “bubble economy”. Primed to benefit from Japan’s economic success were the burgeoning industries of manga and anime, which, in the final decades of the 20th century, became driving forces shaping the global pop cultural zeitgeist, particularly in the worlds of cinema, fashion, and the same Western comic book industry that it had once taken inspiration from. Today, manga dominates comic book sales both domestically and internationally.
Even in the US, home of the superhero genre, as Marvel movies break cinematic records, Marvel Comics are out-sold year-on-year by manga, expected to rise to 70% of the comic book market by 2030–with similar trends also being seen across Europe, especially in the countries that pioneered the comic book format. Despite this, manga is still often categorised as just another sub genre of comic book in the West, while in the East it is an industry of its own and a stronghold of Japan’s soft power, even imitated by its neighbours—China’s manhua and Korea’s manhwa—which take significant inspiration from manga despite having their own storied histories.
For contemporary audiences, it’s clear to see why manga has transcended the simple comic book medium to become a symbol of modern Japanese culture: it’s a story of success that reflects Japan’s own national narrative. From golden-age traditions preserved through centuries of conflict and feudal isolationism, to rebirth amid the rubble of post-WWII reconstruction, and even to Japan’s emergence as a cultural and industrial powerhouse in the late 20th century, manga’s story is, in many ways, Japan’s.
While audiences may debate manga’s origins as a product of western cultural assimilation—inspired by Europe’s 18th-century comic strips and early Disney movies—or a millennia-long legacy of art, humour, and storytelling that began with Toba Sojo’s scrolls, what cannot be debated is manga’s global popularity, proliferating at an increasingly rapid pace thanks to digital developments.
Through manga’s pages–digital or print, domestic or international–it continues to grip readers in a tale of heritage, history, and bold imagination.
About the Author: Aku Owaka-Haigh is a writer and cultural critic dedicated to unraveling the intricate tapestry of cultural, political, and societal identities that define our existence. His work ranges from exploring the zeitgeist of modern pop culture, to challenging the playful assertions of history and tradition that shape contemporary life.
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