-from Episode 9 (“Norakuro to ‘Shin manga-ha shūdan’”) of “Natsume Fusanosuke’s Manga Yarns” (“Natsume Fusanosuke no manga yotabanashi, sono 9,” August 31, 2022)
In Natsume Fusanosuke’s ninth installment of his “Manga Yarns” blog, he rediscovers a 1984 book on the extremely popular prewar and interwar character Black Stray (Norakuro), created by manga pioneer Tagawa Suihō (1899-1989). In this mini-essay, Natsume does a bit of historiography, reconsidering how context is so very important to manga history, particularly the prewar period. His discussion also helps illuminate the state of the pre-Tezuka manga world, indicating what factors would later help bring Tezuka and kodomo manga (children’s comics) to the forefront of the postwar manga scene. This shift in perception, often noted by Tezuka scholars, underscores the extent to which Tezuka redefined both the form and cultural position of manga itself. Although this essay does feature the popular character Norakuro as well as Tezuka, Natsume ultimately redirects the discussion toward a broader consideration of the two dominant artistic camps: those who embraced and promoted American and European cartoon traditions and those who embraced the more “earthy smell” of homegrown Japanese narratives for children (like Tagawa’s Norakuro), grounded in domestic sensibilities and prewar cultural aesthetics. TCJ readers can learn more about this bifurcation in 1930s Japanese comics that grew between “children’s manga” and more sophisticated international manga for adults in the recent 2025 competing histories of manga by Eike Exner and Andrea Horbinski.
By the way, Natsume focuses on Katō Yoshirō’s quotes from the cross-interview in the Tagawa book. For North American readers, Katō is probably not well known. To date, there have been no collections of English translations of Katō’s work. For Japanese audiences, he is a ubiquitous figure. In the final figure in this essay, Katō’s turn at doing a “My Norakuro” memory page actually features a brief bio of this artist. It reads: “Born in Tokyo on June 25, 1925. Graduate from Kawabata Art School. Creator of numerous manga series, but his most representative works include Mappira-kun, Onboro Jinsei (Onboro Life), Ore wa obake da zo (Hey, I Am a Ghost), Matemate Jiisan (Wait-Just-a-Second Old Guy) and Senbiki ninja (1000 Ninja). Currently, he writes for the evening Asahi Shinbun the manga series So, I Am a Ghost (Yappari ore wa obake da zo). Katō is a member of the Manga Group and also the chief officer of the Manga Artists Association.” Katō passed away in 2006.
The translators would like to thank Natsume-sensei for allowing us again to translate his essays for The Comics Journal.
--Jon Holt and Teppei Fukuda
There is a hardcover B5-sized book, My Norakuro: 50thAnniversary Norakuro Album, which was published by Kōdansha in 1984 (Figure 1). Norakuro, or Black Stray, was serialized in Kōdansha’s Shōnen Club (Shōnen kurabu) from 1931 to 1941. It was a very popular series that could boast of probably having the largest number of tankōbon book editions for the prewar period. Its creator, Tagawa Suihō (b. 1899),passed away in 1989, the same year that the Shōwa emperorHirohito died; it was the same year that [singing and filmsuperstar] Misora Hibari died; this was the same year, too, when Tezuka Osamu passed. Therefore, when Kōdansha publishedthe anniversary album My Norakuro, Tagawa himself was still alive at age of eighty-five. The boys’ magazine Shōnen Clubhad the highest circulation of its genre during the prewar era; it was the cultural magazine that probably exerted the most powerful influence on boys for that time period.
And so, as it was then a time to commemorate the release of Tagawa’s 1981 work The Structure of Humor (Kokkei no kōzō) where Tezuka Osamu was there showing off his skillful copying of Norakuro (Figure 2), Katō Yoshirō then suggested that they should have multiple manga artists each serialize their own takes of Norakuro in a multi-panel cartoon page. Nagata Takemaru organized the serialization of this idea in the magazine Maru, where postwar Norakuro [cartoons] wereserialized. The My Norakuro album came about as a result of those serializations. As you read how the circumstances came together like this, I bet you must be thinking, “Golly.” Actually, I too thought the same thing.
However, I noticed something odd as I was reading the “My Norakuro” panel interview, which was included in the book. This crosstalk featured Onozawa San’ichi [1917-2000], Katō Yoshirō [1925-2006], Satō Sanpei [1929-2021], Sugiura Yukio [1911-2004], Takita Yū [1931-1990], and, it had Nagata Takemaru [1934-2022] for its moderator. Their discussion began with Onozawa and Satō talking about their experiences reading Black Stray when they were boys. And yet, the tone of the talk changes when Sugiura Yukio, who was born in 1911,and Katō Yoshirō, who was born in 1925, began to share their feelings.
Sugiura: After we made our Manga Group (Manga Shūdan) and when the group was on the rise and everybody getting excited, you had, on the other side, the Kodanshacompany with all of Tagawa-san’s work there starting toget all of the attention. However, as his rival, I didn’t want to recognize Tagawa getting to be so famous, with himgetting to be such a big deal, you know? I would complain about it like, “What the hell! What is that!?” (All participants chime in agreement, “I know, I know…”)
Katō: I totally get what you’re saying. I could really feel something similar. I had those feelings, but, for me, they were toward Yokoyama Ryūichi.
Satō: But when it comes to the aspects of drawing that Yokoyama or Mr. Sugiura [here] had, well, Tagawa’s was totally different, you know?
Sugiura: We were different. So different. Totally different.
Katō: The kind of things that Mr. Sugiura felt about Tagawa, well, for me I didn’t feel it as much. But I did feelthat way about Tezuka Osamu. […] In other words, when it came to Tezuka Osamu’s manga, I would barely read any of his stuff, you know? […]
Sugiura: That’s true for me, for the same reason: I was notlooking all that closely at what Tagawa was doing. Even so, I did not want to recognize what a big deal he was. And yet, the popularity of his Black Stray really was amazing.
Hold on just a minute. What was all that? Upon first reading it, I felt their stories might be lacking the truth. However, there might be a quite similar tendency that they shared with the group of manga artists who came out of thelineage called the “Manga Group” (Manga Shūdan), which was started during the prewar years. I get the impression that theydidn’t let it bother them that much. You see, a lot of these people were originally quite left-wing in their political leanings, but during the war years, most of them became artists who ended upserving in the army and they made propaganda; but then, at the end of the war and with Japan’s defeat, suddenly they switched sides again to join with the populists [on the left]. Even so, apparently these changes didn’t feel like betrayal for them. Still, I just wonder how on earth could those men, who had probably never read Black Stray, could be a part of the My Norakurobook. Well, perhaps they got away with it because of the candidness and frankness of manga artists’ circle. And then, well, when it comes to playing it loose and being irresponsible, I shouldn’t really complain about other people, you know.
Anyway, when we get to that point of the Manga Group,which Sugiura is describing as “noisy,” you have the creators who called themselves the “New Manga-School Group” (Shin Manga-ha Shūdan), which was formed in 1932 by people like Sugiura Yukio, Kondō Hidezō, Yokoyama Ryūichi, etc, who were all newcomers back then. It would only be after WWII that they would change their name to “Manga Group” (Manga Shūdan). Before that, it was people like Okamoto Ippei, who succeeded Kitazawa Rakuten as a popular manga artist, and others who formed groups like “Tokyo Manga Association” (Tokyo Manga Kai), “Japanese Manga Association” (Nihon Manga Kai), and the like. These were the people who came together to form all these groups and worked so hard to promote manga. Soon enough, you then see groups that consisted of Proletarian cartoonists, so we’re talking about Murayama Tomoyoshi, Yanase Masamu, Suyama Kei’ichi, who weredefinitely influenced by Marxism. To some extent, as a kind of reaction to those Proletarian groups, this “New Manga-SchoolGroup” was then formed and its core members were newcomer manga artists.
Originally, Sugiura was the [prototypical] “Marxist boy” (Marukusu bōi), a type that was so popular back then. It also seems to be asserted that they gave their group the dubious name of “New Manga-School Group” in order to give it a sharp left-wing feel. According to Mineshima Masayuki, in his KondōHidezō’s World (Kondō Hidezō no sekai, Seiabō 1984), “That word ‘group’ (shūdan) was primarily a sociological term and it was used at the same time by academics writing about socialism […] The [suffix] -ha (‘-school’ [sometimes translated as
‘-wing’ or ‘-branch’]) was, in the world of art, a term that usually meant an école or school, for example, used for the Impressionists or the Fauvists.” That is why, Mineshima thinks, Sugiura used those terms back then as “they were in vogue and were the edgiest terms in the cultural sphere.” Early members of this New Manga-School Group included the followers of Okamoto Ippei, followers of Shimokawa Hekoten that came from Kitazawa Rakuten’s group, etc. In other words, the New Manga-School Group rallied together with “super-partisan-like” newcomers.
As I read their panel discussion (above) and knowing that kind of history, certain details began to stand out to me. For example, at the time of the New Manga-School Group’s formation, Sugiura was twenty-one years old; Katō was just seven years of age; Katō, who was chiming with them, saying, “I totally get what you’re saying,” actually was not talking about Tagawa, instead he is just agreeing with them in general about how all manga artists have a competitive streak, so that is why his comment comes out with the context of things being more about Tezuka. What I can guess from that section of their interview is that when Satō is talking about how there is a difference in the kind of art that Tagawa did versus the kind that Sugiura and Katō did, I bet all of this stuff might be hard for readers today to understand. Anyway, it is probably safe to sum up what Satō is saying here is that, on one hand, you had the fashionable mood of the New Manga-School Group’s house style, which was more modern and Western-influenced; theirs was a style aimed more at adult readers. Then, on the other hand, you had also cartoons marketed to children. (It is true that Tagawa’s pictures [i.e., Norakuro] definitely had a modern feel to them, but Kōdansha, as his publisher, was putting out cartoons that gave off a strong “whiff of dirt” [i.e., smelling old-fashioned], that could sell [not only in the big cities] but also in rural regions as well.) In other words, from the background of their discussion, one can take away the distinctions in the flow of these cliques and groups. That part, for me, becomes super clear right after Katō says this:
Katō: What the Manga Group was aiming for was the so-called “modern American nonsense manga,” which wasassociated with magazines, like New Youth (Shinseinen) and Asahi Graph, right?
Later on in their talk, they mention how the cartoons of New Youth, with their Western, “buttery smell,” would never make it into the homes of families. That magazine was oriented to the seinen (young males), whereas Kōdansha’s magazines Shōnen Club and King (Kingu) would easily be found in any family home. They go on to explain how the latter magazines were ones that even girls or children in general could enjoy. In other words, Black Stray is discussed in the context of prewar manga, where they categorize that genre into one group that wasmade for children and then another group where you have cartoons that were targeted to adult males. Black Stray, of course, was thus seen that way from the point of view of the New Manga-School Group. That is probably why Katōnaturally makes the connection to Tezuka, who was doing children’s manga.
Let me try to put it differently: in the time between the prewar and postwar periods, there is a gap in the genres of children’s manga and the kind of manga that Manga Group did. Both, by the way, were the two popular streams of manga at that time. The Manga Group artists probably very clearly saw this gap. Let’s be clear: for the Manga Group artists, children’s manga was something truly indispensable for them. And this feeling or perception would go on to strongly influence the situation for the manga scene even after the war. If we do not factor into our consideration this disparity, then I think it will be impossible to have a full three-dimensional view of manga history. It’s just that once we put the history of manga into a simple opposition like this--and, sure, the opposition makes the history easy to grasp—there could be a trap that swallows up the important details, so we must instead approach this part of manga history extremely carefully.
The post Norakuro and the New Manga-School Group appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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