energetically improving the nation’s primary education system, starting with the Shogakko-rei (Elementary School Act) in 1886 and subsequent revisions. Keeping pace with this systematic change was a growing interest in what should be given to children for reading. On the one hand, the government decided to introduce national textbooks in 1903 to control the contents of education; on the other, the groups protesting the Meiji government (the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement) and the liberals in the following Taisho era (Taisho Democracy) aimed at their own ideal education for children.
It was therefore no surprise that the first magazines for children were launched by those committed to education. Shonen-en (The Youth’s Garden, 1888-95) was established by YAMAGATA Teizaburo, an editor of national textbooks in the Ministry of Education; Sho-kokumin (The Children of the Nation, 1889-95) was edited by ISHII Kendo, a former teacher; and IWAYA Sazanami, an influential children’s author, served as the main writer of Shonen Sekai (The Youth’s World, 1895-1933). At the beginning of the 20th century, magazines commercially marketed to children started to be published. The first of them, Nihon Shonen (Japanese Boys, 1906-38) allegedly sold more than 350,000 copies in 1919(2). The contents of these magazines were of course various, but stories about adventure and fights taken from historical narratives were not absent. Western literature, along with Chinese, was also vigorously introduced: an abridged translation of Jules Verne’s Two Years’ Vacation (1888) first appeared in Shonen Sekai as early as 1896.
Manga and Magazines before World War II
While the successive ‘victories’ in the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), and WWI (1914-19) accelerated the Japanese economy, it also invited a tide of militarism. The media and thought control was strengthened especially after the 1932 assassination of Prime Minister INUKAI Tsuyoshi. It was around this time, however, that a national comic hero made his debut in one of the rivals of Nihon Shonen, Shonen Kurabu (Boys’ Club, 1914-62) in 1931. The protagonist of TAGAWA Suiho’s popular works is a shabby black pup named Norakuro (meaning ‘Black Stray’), who joins the army (of dogs) just to secure a place to sleep and get regular meals. Norakuro’s operations were serialized and continued up until 1941 when the state of affairs became more tense. It was a success story (Norakuro starts as a private and is finally promoted to a captain) abundant with fights and operations, but it derives its attraction from the author’s sympathy for underprivileged children, which reflects his own early history. The idea of a canine protagonist was hinted at by the magazine editor KATO Kenichi’s suggestion of ‘dogs playing as soldiers’ — two favourite things of boys(3).
Shonen Kurabu supplied another boy hero in the form of SHIMADA Keizo’s Boken Dankichi (Dankichi the Adventurer, 1933-39), who becomes king of a tropical island in the Pacific. Still another is Tank Tankuro (1934-36) by SAKAMOTO Gajo. The author ‘intended to write a samurai story, but wanted to create a new kind of superman. He came up with the idea of enclosing a human in a ball of iron and making him act in crazy, offbeat ways’(4). What Tankuro is, is not explained throughout the series, but he seems to be a robot and is given an equally wonderful opponent, Kuro-Kabuto (Black Helmet), whose appearance might remind us of Darth Vader from the Star Wars universe.
After World War II
Kinko Ito summarizes the manga magazines after WWII (5):
In the years after the war, a number of new manga magazines were founded. These included Manga kurabu (Manga Club), VAN, Kodomo manga Shimbun (Children’s Manga Newspaper), Kumanbati (The Hornet), Manga shōnen (Manga Boys), Tokyo Pakku (Tokyo Puck), and Kodomo manga kurabu (Children’s Manga Club). This manga boom lasted about three years. Most Japanese people at this time were hungry and poor; they were unhappy with current politics and afraid for the future. They were starving for entertainment and humor as well as for food. Manga was easily affordable, and the newly emerging civil society during the seven-year U.S. occupation provided an abundance of topics for satire. [. . .] The Korean War [1950-53] was a godsend to Japanese industry. It produced a big American demand for Japanese goods, and by 1951, “Japan reached almost prewar levels of production and consumption per capita” even though trade was still less than the prewar level(6). The red purge began in June 1950, and it was the children’s manga that started to be energized. Many masterpieces of children’s and youth manga were produced by artists such as Osamu Tezuka, Eiichi Fukui, and Shigeru Sugiura. [. . .] In March 1959, Kōdansha, one of the largest publishing companies in Japan [and one that had been publishing Shonen Kurabu], started to publish Shōnen magajin (Boys’ Magazine), the first weekly comic magazine designed for boys and young adults. The magazine had a few hundred pages of manga and was primarily targeted to young males [. . .]. Shōgakukan started publishing Shōnen Sandē [Boys’ Sunday] in April 1959, only one month after Shōnen magajin. These two weekly magazines were not so radically different from the existing monthly manga magazines for boys, and the sales were not very good until the emergence of Kyojin no hoshi (Star of the Giants, a baseball player’s story) in Shōnen magajin in 1966 and Ashita no Jō (Tomorrow’s Joe — a boxer’s story) in 1968. [. . .] The sales of Shōnen magajin topped one million in 1966, and, thanks to the popularity of Kyojin no hoshi and Ashita no Jō, attracted even more fans. The sales of the boys’ magazine exceeded 1.5 million at the end of 1968, the year Ashita no Jō debuted(7). Both Kyojin no hoshi and Ashita no Jō are stories about hard work and perseverance as the keys to success, and their popularity could be related to the social and economic issues that were important in Japan at the time.
The magazines for boys had to keep an eye on their juvenile audience, and the works in them often took up as their protagonists boys of a similar age to the readers. It must have been a thrilling experience for the boy readers to read a story in which the youthful hero successfully struggles in an adult world. But to enable the heroes to achieve this goal, stories for boys, especially dealing with the theme of battle, needed assistance from a more traditional source.
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