Manga’s First Century is about the history of manga. It says 1905 to 1989 in the subtitle, but actually it jumps back immediately to the 1860s, when periodicals first emerged in Japan. It is about 125 years, give or take, which is a long time for a modern history. I am making the argument that manga is a modern thing that emerges out of modernity in Japan. Exploring where periodicals started in Japan, and what manga was reacting against when it was first conceived in the 1890s, is integral to the argument.

There are a lot of people who want to foreshorten manga history. Many people want to start after World War II—the Asia-Pacific Wars, as they are called in Japan. Some people have recently said they want to start in 1923. And then there’s also people who want to go back to the Edo period, or even earlier, to the Heian period, with the illustrated picture scrolls from Genji and others.

All of these people are wrong, basically. Part of the argument of the book is that ‘here is the history of manga’. You can’t start it in 1923. In 1923, there were massive changes that were kicked off in some parts of manga, but not all of them. Those changes were instigated by Japanese creators, and they were drawing on existing manga practices that already existed. The same thing with 1945, and even 1947—which is often thrown around, because it’s when Tezuka published his first akahon manga, with a co-creator. It wasn’t him alone, and the co-creator, Sakai Shichima, had already worked in the manga industry. Tezuka grew up reading manga in the 30s, so he didn't come out of nowhere either. The manga industry itself had a lot of transwar continuities with previous manga practices.

That's a big part of why the book is so large. I tried to talk as much about different kinds of manga as possible, partly to make the point that there's the manga that became kind of mainstream and exported worldwide, but then there's a lot of other stuff that's happened in manga—and that still happens to some extent—that isn't necessarily translated or as popular abroad. That is one big thing.

Another is that I wanted to emphasize the role that fans have played in manga's history. A lot of people have written about manga solely from an industrial perspective, and have missed or overlooked individual creators. They have missed the ways that audiences have really driven manga. People started entering the profession without having gone to art school in the 30s, because they just liked manga. One of them was Hasegawa Machiko, who wrote Sazae-san, which is the basis for the longest-running animated show in the world. It was a huge hit in her day. People who love manga have had a huge influence on the medium and the industry.

I also wanted to talk about the rise of dōjinshi, i.e. amateur comics, which is amateur production.  Now you can get amateur jewelry, amateur zines, guitar repair, amateur video games and amateur anime, too. So I wanted to talk about dōjinshi, which is driven by people who are not operating in professional capacity, although a lot of professional creators do dōjinshi and cross back and forth, and a lot of professional creators come out of dōjinshi first.

I wanted to talk about that as an integrated part of manga. Not simply that people also do this too. This is hugely important for the industry, for manga as a whole, and for part of why manga has this overwhelming variety of content in it. Fans in the 1970s, thanks to Tezuka in the 1960s, were all linked through a network of fan clubs that grew out of a single magazine his company published—one whose impact Tezuka never really anticipated. Tezuka’s often talked about as the god of manga, or the inventor of anime, both of which are true. I talked a little bit about his role in anime, but I talked more about what his real innovations in the 50s were in manga, which was not necessarily the cinematic motion which he's attributed with, but also, tragedy. I also talk about how he thought that manga was not solely for laughter, and his role in kick-starting this fan revolution—which still continues today and which has gone worldwide in a lot of senses. This is a big part of what the book is trying to do.

I also talk about proletarian manga, because I think it's sort of unknown. Even in Japan, it's not necessarily talked about a lot partly because the practitioners were sort of all tortured into recanting by the end of the 30s. But I think it was an important, very interesting part of manga history, part of Japan’s leftist history. There is also the “Ban Bad Books” movement, or the akusho tsuihō undō, which is this grassroots movement that starts in 1955 with this aim of banning bad manga. It’s also widely forgotten in Japan, and hardly ever mentioned outside of it. Even in Japanese writing about the history of manga, critics and scholars say that it was over by the end of 1955-56 the latest. But I went back and read the newspaper archives of the Rental Book Association in Tokyo, and they were saying that the Bad Books activists continued into the mid-60s. Tezuka himself—in one of his memoirs—wrote about the effects that these people were having on his fellow creators into the mid-1960s. Education periodicals also documented book burnings in ‘63.

It's also a very interesting parallel with American comics, where they implement the Comics Code Authority, a self-imposed censorship regime—manga basically completely escaped that as a whole. It is an interesting comparison to think about. They diverged so starkly if you think about their historical development as industries, too.

Manga transitioned in the 60s though the end of children's manga into shōnen and shōjo manga—manga aimed at boys and manga aimed at girls emerge and are starkly gender divided. There's a lot of scholarship that if you read it, you would think that children were reading gender-segregated manga before that, and that's not really true. I tried to get into how that is a misperception, and what did actually change in the 60s that did make reading manga amongst children much more gender-segregated. Those are some of the major, major points that I was trying to make.