Jun Ishikawa
Orbiting Rumic World - File 4
By Harley Acres
The Mangaka Turned Critic
In order to fully understand Rumiko Takahashi and her contributions to the field of manga as a whole, you have to understand her place within that field, and that involves examining her influences, peers and followers. This is what Orbiting Rumic World is dedicated to exploring.
Manga has become more and more ubiquitous outside of Japan. Topics that were once esoteric and obscure within foreign fandom have been brought to light and discussed with the same monomania that was once reserved for the most enlightened of otaku. Perhaps one area that is still left largely unexplored is an admittedly metatextual topic... a discussion about the discussion of manga in Japan. One of the most esteemed manga critics is Jun Ishikawa (いしかわじゅん), a mangaka himself, and part of the famous New Wave movement of the late 1970s. It is in his writing about manga in countless books and articles and alongside his late-night television panel where he has spent years debating manga that has made his name familiar in manga circles within Japan.
Ishikawa was born in 1951 in Toyota City, Aichi Prefecture, a city named for the Toyota Motor Company that calls it home. Ishikawa would find himself working for the automobile company for only a single month in his twenties before leaving in 1976 to pursue a career in manga. "I'm going to lose my ability to think, and if I don't do this, I'm going to go downhill." [1] In college at Meiji University he counted Kaiji Kawaguchi (川口 開治) and Riu Honma (ほんまりう) as fellow members of his manga club. After leaving Toyota Ishikawa moved in with his parents who quickly became annoyed with their son throwing away a good job so quickly and doing nothing around the house. When they pressed Ishikawa about his future plans he flippantly told them he would become a manga artist. Consequently, he realized he needed to begin making an effort to pursue this new vocation. [2]
With his career launching in the mid 1970s Ishikawa soon found himself grouped among what was known as The New Wave (ニューウェーブ), a loose classification of a coterie of young artists from the late 1970s into the early 1980s who were debuting outside of the major manga magazines and were focused on subjects beyond the quartet of shonen, shojo, gekiga and adult manga that comprised the primary classification of manga at the time. The major figures to come out of the New Wave were Katsuhiro Otomo, Daijiro Morohoshi and Hideo Azuma (though Azuma rejected the term in a 1981 interview). [3] The New Wave dissolved in 1980 with the launch of Big Comic Spirits and Young Magazine which were created to be more high-profile homes for the avant garde manga crafted by these young artists and many of them relocated to these two magazines. It was in the early days of Big Comic Spirits that Ishikawa found himself being published side by side with a rising young star who was concurrently publishing two of the most popular manga of all time- Rumiko Takahashi. Takahashi helped launch Big Comic Spirits alongside two of the New Wave, Ishikawa and Azuma, while at the same time publishing Urusei Yatsura each week in Shonen Sunday.
Ishikawa established himself as a gag artist, with series such as From K (フロムK) which was a comical autobiographical look at his own life, Chandora (ちゃんどら) in Big Comic Spirits and columns on pro-wrestling. His drawing style is simplistic, and his series are often brief, humorous and absurdist tales. Soon however, in addition to his own manga, Ishikawa began to write columns of manga criticism, highlighting obscure manga that interested him. These columns would eventually be collected in two volumes Manga no Jikan (漫画の時間) and Manga Note (漫画ノート).
In the mid-1990s Ishikawa had edited a special issue of Manga Action which he used to highlight favorite authors that worked in the manga industry. From the success of this issue he then wrote his first book of manga criticism, Manga no Jikan (漫画の時間). The success of this book helped develop manga criticism as a more mainstream topic and lead to the launch of BS Manga Yawa (BSマンガ夜話/BS Manga Night Talk), a late night manga criticism and discussion program. Through Ishikawa's criticism he has become a respected connoisseur of manga. He served on the committee for selecting the Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize from its inception in 1997 until its 12th ceremony in 2008. Along with Hisashi Eguchi he has compiled a collection of the best short stories written in manga, a collection entitled Japanese Short Manga Masterpiece Collection (日本短編漫画傑作集), which includes stories by Osamu Tezuka (Cave In/落盤/Rakuban), Sanpei Shirato (War/戦争/Senso), Shotaro Ishinomori (Freak Club/奇人クラブ/Kijin Kurabu), Ryoichi Ikegami (Game Reserve/禁漁区/Kinryoku), Rumiko Takahashi (Fire Tripper/炎トリッパー), Kenshi Hirokane (My Baby/私の赤ちゃん/Watashi no Akachan) and many more.
In his book Manga no Jikan, Ishikawa introduced several manga series that would be considered "underground" comics. Many of them dealt with motorcycle gangs, gay relationships, little known shojo series and obscure gag strips. The book became a significant hit and established him as a manga tastemaker. [4] While publishing columns of manga criticism he was continuing to draw manga, write novels and even provide designs for video games such as his design for Superman for the 1987 Kemco game on the Famicom.
His fame as a serious analyst of manga would continue to rise as he served as a panelist on BS Manga Yawa from 1996 until 2009. The rest of the panel included producer/critic/Gainax founder Toshio Okada (岡田斗司夫) and manga critic/manga artist/grandson of Soseki Natsume, Fusunosuke Natsume (夏目房之介). Natsume and Ishikawa serve as the baby boomer perspective on manga while Okada and moderator Takahiro Otsuki are the voices of the otaku generation, who were teenagers in the 1980s. Each member of the panel is said to contribute a different style of analysis with Ishikawa providing the most blunt assessment of the chosen work according to his cohost Natsume. Natsume went on to state that some of Ishikawa’s comments have drawn the ire of the authors and their fans. [5]
An example of Ishikwa’s criticism devolving into a feud was his comment about the way that fellow New Wave artist Hideo Azuma drew feet, which Ishikawa stated were too small. Picking up on their prickly relationship, Osamu Tezuka mocked the two by having characters based upon each of them marry one another in his early 1980s manga Rainbow Parakeet (七色いんこ/Nana-iro Inko). [6]
It was not only Azuma who fell out with Ishikawa. At one time Ishikawa was close friends with manga writer Marley Caribu, however as Ishikawa writes in his book Secret Bookshelf (秘密の本棚) he and Caribu had a falling out. [7] In the 1980s Ishikawa was publishing Chandora (ちゃんどら) in Big Comic Spirits and created a character named "Dr. Kaze" based on Caribu's appearance. Years later, in 1987, Ishikawa carried this character over into his new manga From K (フロムＫ) where he commented on Caribu frequently attending parties, becoming angry and leaving. He poked fun at the writer claiming he would "spin around in a tornado like Dr. Kaze" when he got drunk at parties before storming out. Ishikawa further stated that Caribu always claimed to dislike parties but would frequently come to them and then grow fussy and leave. Ishikawa said he had exaggerated the story for comedic effect, but that it had a lot of truth in it as well. Ishikawa would later discover that Caribu took a shot at him in his own manga, Meiso-ou Border (迷走王 ボーダー) by showing Ishikawa and fellow manga writer (and friend to Ishikawa and Caribu) Natsuo Sekikawa arriving at a party, behaving snobbishly, parading around in their underwear and growing jealous if one of their peers ever had a hit manga. Ishikawa states he was annoyed by Caribu's manga which he said was "humorless", however Sekikawa was furious. Ishikawa publicly sided with Sekikawa and Marley Caribu had to print an apology in the following issue of Manga Action (the magazine that published Border). The row destroyed the friendship between the trio. Jun Ishikawa stated on his Twitter that he regretted not making up with Marley Caribu after attending his funeral. [8]
The Critical Eye on Rumiko Takahashi
It is through Ishikawa’s collection of short stories that we can bring Rumiko Takahashi into the discussion, but we can touch on his interactions with Takahashi in other venues as well. Earlier in the 1980s Takahashi did an illustration of Jun Ishikawa and then wrote a single page manga about meeting him, agreeing to exchange books and getting a signed copy of his latest manga only to forget to send him a copy of hers for five years. One of the policies of his program, BS Manga Yawa, was to only look at a single work by an author during the show’s entire run, however Takahashi is one of the very rare exceptions to this rule. In 1996 the show took up Takahashi’s Maison Ikkoku for an hour-long analysis. This episode saw Ishikawa joined by Kentaro Takekuma, author of Even A Monkey Can Draw Manga (サルでも描けるまんが教室/Saru Demo Egakeru Manga Kyoshitsu), and voice actress Tarako. One of the criticisms Ishikawa places upon Takahashi’s work was that the story remains static and does not develop. [9]
In 2009 the show looked at Takahashi’s then recently completed Inuyasha. The panel holds the series up as embodying all of the elements of Takahashi’s prior works: love triangles, time travel, supernatural elements, action and some moments of slapstick comedy. They comment that the series is Takahashi’s Dragon Ball, not just in the sense of its popularity within her body of work, but that the series is a journey, traveling across the landscape in search of the missing shards of the Shikon Jewel much like Goku and his friends in their hunt for the titular Dragon Balls. They speak about Takahashi’s art style changing subtly. Here we see Ishikawa demonstrating the way that Takahashi drew faces and hair and how that has changed by the time of Inuyasha. The panel mentions the popularity of her work overseas stating that they heard “the book sold out in bookstores in France and America before it was even translated” stating that her artwork and storyline are understandable even without a translation. They discuss the appeal of a series like this sitting on a bookstore shelf in France compared to Maison Ikkoku, a series they believe would have been inaccessible to their imagined French reader by comparison, summing this line of thinking up with an affirmation of the universality of shonen manga (when compared to Takahashi’s seinen series).
Fusunosuke Natsume states that Takahashi seemed to find the story as she went along, that in a true sense the manga does not begin in some ways until volume 8 with the revelation of Naraku’s face. They point out that Takahashi seemed uncertain if the time travel element would be more important early on as we saw demons in the present day as well as in the feudal era. Then we see the slow addition of more traveling companions such as Shippo and Miroku who is used to introduce Naraku. Then Naraku is tied to Kikyo via Onigumo before revealing his true nature and ushering in the thrust of the overall series in volume 8. [10] Natsume concludes that Takahashi, at this point in her weekly writing, must have felt like she had found the direction of the series going forward. Natsume also makes the connection between a love triangle with Inuyasha, Kagome and the deceased Kikyo, comparing it with the love triangle of Godai, Kyoko and the memory of her deceased husband, Soichiro, in Maison Ikkoku. He adds that this is also the case in Mitsuru Adachi’s Touch and is something that can likely be traced back to Ashita no Joe.
The BS Manga Yawa panel discusses that 90 percent of the reader response to their episode on the analysis of Inuyasha is from women and that the previously mentioned love triangle, alongside Sesshomaru’s appearance, are all attractive to female readers. [11] The panel further states that this is something only a female author would know how to achieve in a shonen series. The panel also openly wonder if Takahashi had wanted to end Inuyasha earlier but perhaps the high sales of the manga encouraged her to continue, a comparison they draw with Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball.
Through the lens of Jun Ishikawa this is meant to be a primer into the larger world of manga criticism. There are a number of names and works to mention for those that might wish to explore more on the topic. Jun Ishikawa’s three books, Manga no Jikan (漫画の時間), Manga Note (漫画ノート) and Secret Bookshelf (秘密の本棚), Natsume Fusanosuke’s Challenge to Manga Studies (マンガ学への挑戦) and Eiji Otsuka, author of MPD Psycho and The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service who has written a number of books on manga culture and consumption including Monogatari Shohiron (物語消費論).
Footnotes
- [1] Fujita, Takashi. "To become a manga artist, you must make the most of your moratorium period as a student." Popeye September 1982. 44-45. https://www.furinkan.com/ takahashi/takahashi71.html.
- [2] Fujita, Takashi. "To become a manga artist, you must make the most of your moratorium period as a student." Popeye September 1982. 44-45. https://www.furinkan.com/ takahashi/takahashi71.html.
- [3] 夏目房之介. 『風雲マンガ列伝 いま読むマンガ116冊』小学館、2000年, 236-237頁.
- [4] Acres, Harley and Dylan Acres. "Ishikawa-sensei, Do You Remember?." Rumic Theater. August 27, 2022. Accessed June 19, 2023. https://www.furinkan.com/ rumictheater/manga/ishikawa.html.
- [5] 夏目房之介. 『マンガ学への挑戦 進化する批評地図』NTT出版〈NTT出版ライブラリーレゾナント003〉, 2004年10月.
- [6] Tezuka, Osamu. Rainbow Parakeet, Volume 4. Tokyo: Akita Publishing, 1982. https://tezukaosamu.net/ en/manga/320.html.
- [7] Ishikawa, Jun. Secret Bookshelf. Tokyo: Shogakukan Creative. April, 2009. https://blog.goo.ne.jp/ jiro-taniguchi-fan/e/e94b0d485c83c45fa0377105f766c107.
- [8] @ishikawajun. Twitter Post. July 12, 2018, 12:28pm. https://twitter.com/ishikawajun/ status/1017460626401067008.
- [9] BSマンガ夜話. 2001. Season 1, Episode 4, “めぞん一刻.” Directed by Unknown. Aired August 22, 1996 on NHK. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=CwgukyWA9so.
- [10] BSマンガ夜話. 2009. Season 37, Episode 2, “犬夜叉.” Directed by Unknown. Aired December 22, 2009 on NHK. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=_a_e9YwyTnU.
- [11] BSマンガ夜話. 2009. Season 37, Episode 2, “犬夜叉.” Directed by Unknown. Aired December 22, 2009 on NHK. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=_a_e9YwyTnU.
Harley Acres is an art history professor at Pikes Peak State College in Colorado Springs. Along with his brother, Dylan Acres, he is the co-founder of the Rumic World website.
