Defining Manga Anew by Way of History

It was only from the 1920s that “manga” came regularly to designate comics and cartoons in Japan. The term had been used from the nineteenth century to title artist collections (particularly sketches of the everyday), but its connotations were malleable enough to suit the objectives of those who began to call themselves manga-ka (manga artists). Retranslations of the past were integral to the redefinition of the word; early histories indiscriminately mislabeled all varieties of past Japanese visual humor manga. Okamoto Ippei (1886-1948), the avatar of the newly formed manga world, performed a delicate task in his book Shin manga no kakikata (How To Draw New Manga, 1928), differentiating past from present while prescribing guidelines for future manga. In proposing new meanings for “manga” at this particular historical moment, Ippei was responding to deep underlying tensions between elite and popular culture, individualism and collectivism, and nationalism and cosmopolitanism.