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- Title
A History ofMangain the Context of Japanese Culture and Society.
- Authors
Ito, Kinko
- Abstract
This article explores the history of manga or Japanese comic art and how it reflected events in Japanese society during various historical periods. Manga has humor, satire, exaggeration, and wit. The comic art includes caricature, cartoon, editorial cartoon, syndicated panel, daily humor strip, story-manga, and animation. Like any other form of visual art, literature, or entertainment, manga does not exist in a vacuum. It is immersed in a particular social environment that includes history, language, culture, politics, economy, family, religion, sex and gender, education, deviance and crime, and demography. Manga thus reflects the reality of Japanese society, along with the myths, beliefs, rituals, tradition, fantasies, and Japanese way of life. Manga also depicts other social phenomena, such as social order and hierarchy, sexism, racism, ageism, classicism, and others. The Japanese culture belongs to what U.S. anthropologist Edward Hall calls the high context culture, in which people prefer to use more implicit, unclear, and ambiguous messages whose meanings are found in the context, rather than explicit, clear, and straightforward messages. According to Japanese anthropologist Masao Kunihiro, English is intended strictly for communication. Japanese is primarily interested in feeling out the other person's mood. Japan is a small island nation with a long history, and the people are homogeneous. In contrast, the U.S., according to Hall, belongs to the low context culture, in which messages themselves are important and everything must be spelled out. Japanese communication, being in the high context culture, relies more on contextual cues such as facial expressions, gestures, eye glances, length and timing of silence, tone of voice, and grunts, all of which can be expressed in manga very eloquently.
- Subjects
JAPAN; MANGA (Art); COMIC books, strips, etc.; JAPANESE fantasy fiction; WIT &; humor; MANNERS &; customs
- Publication
Journal of Popular Culture, 2005, Vol 38, Issue 3, p456
- ISSN
1540-5931
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/j.0022-3840.2005.00123.x