Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan

1. Visualizing Religion

35 b C H A P T E R 1 Visualizing Religion Just as a mangaka juxtaposes a series of discrete panels to create a comprehensive story, in the first half of this chapter I juxtapose several brief sketches of notable technological innovations in Japanese illustrated media to narrate the history of some stylistic, topical, and industrial tendencies that have come to characterize contemporary manga and anime culture. While I resist the presentist urge to equate earlier illustrated narrative media like premodern emaki and early modern illustrated novels (kibyōshi) with modern manga and anime, I argue that there are important similarities in the ways in which contemporary producers and premodern proselytizers and performers have used combinations of image, text, and script in didactic and recreational settings related to religion. In the second half of the chapter, I examine some common compositional techniques to show some of the ways in which producers of manga and anime visualize religious ideas and ideals. Specifically, I show how artists’ and directors’ decisions about how to manage the ratio between text and image, how to approximate real-time motion, where and how to provide or omit background (literal and figurative), and how to expediently convey and elicit emotion all contribute to the capacity of a given work to invite vicarious experience and to take on religious significance through the creation of religious frames of mind. I furthermore show how marketing serves as another layer of rendition, determining the target audience and thereby expanding or circumscribing a given product’s reach. Pedagogical Pictures and Proselytizing Priests Considering their prodigious production of emaki and statuary, it seems that premodern Buddhists embraced the old adage that a picture is worth a thou- Visualizing Religion 36 sand words, treating images as expedient means to pedagogical—and ultimately soteriological—ends. Pictures, however, are only worth any number of words if they are comprehensible, and their intended audiences must be fluent in the visual and verbal vocabulary that informs them to serve as reasonable proselytizing media. In the absence of such fluency, translation is indispensable . This pragmatic consideration contributed to the development of a class of specialist preachers who used images to amuse their audiences while simultaneously using the same images to explain religious content. With their ability to orally animate the images found in emaki depictions of hell, the six realms of existence (rokudō), and various foundation stories of temples and shrines, these raconteurs (called etoki) proved through their office that there are times when a word may very well be worth a thousand pictures. Their practice, which went by the same name (etoki), entertained audiences while simultaneously encouraging audiences to entertain religious ideas. EMAKI The modern categories of “art” and “religion” were not discrete in the emaki of premodern Japan. For example, emaki were often used to advertise the particular benefits that could accrue from the patronage of a particular deity or temple, simultaneously providing entertainment and salvation. Many emaki also depicted the lives of important historical figures, serving the function of being aesthetically pleasing, mapping the area where a person lived or traveled, providing instruction on the exemplary life of the person in question, and sharing an entertaining story. Emaki depictions of Shōtoku Taishi (574–622) are one example. Like other ancient period religious figures such as Kōbō Daishi (a common epithet for Kūkai, the formulator of Japanese Esoteric Buddhism), Shōtoku Taishi has been fully turned into a figure of legend. He is famous for introducing Buddhism to Japan and for establishing a seventeen-article constitution; his hagiography includes miraculous feats such as flying over mountains. There are a number of extant pictorial biographies (eden) of Shōtoku Taishi, including some in the collection of the Tokyo National Museum, and also in the collections of some temples such as the hanging emaki at Hōryūji (allegedly founded by Shōtoku Taishi himself). Similar, if less reverent, illustrated hagiographies also have appeared in recent years. Mangaka Yamagishi Ryōko, for example, portrays the prince as a conniving and cross-dressing wizard who Visualizing Religion 37 has a clandestine love affair with Soga no Emishi (son of Soga no Umako) in her manga Prince of the Place of the Rising Sun (Hi izuru tokoro no tenshi). Other emaki images of the Japanese ancient and medieval periods were hortatory pictures of hells, the six realms of existence, and...