The "Real" Underlying the Ideal: Tsuge Yoshiharu's Critique of the Rural Image Open Access
Ransom, Alex-Ko Yamashita (2010)
Abstract
Abstract
The "Real" Underlying the Ideal: Tsuge Yoshiharu's Critique of the
Rural Image
By Alex Ko Yamashita Ransom
In in the late 1960s and 1970s, Japan was well into its postwar
economic boom,
bringing with it rapid changes to all segments of Japanese society.
Along with these
changes came in some a sense of lost national identity and social
harmony, which many
believed could be found in rural Japan. One artist who was drawn to
rural Japan as a place
where one could attempt to escape this sense of urban oppression
was Tsuge Yoshiharu, a
little-studied manga artist who became a major Japanese cultural
figure in the late 1960s.
Among artists who felt this draw, Tsuge is also one of the earliest
to also criticize
this line of thinking. Through close readings of a number of his
works from the 1960s to the
1970s, one can see a consistent theme of presenting rural Japan as
a place that is wholly
alien to an outsider, suggesting that such a return to the past
through rural Japan is an
impossibility. As time passed and this draw towards rural Japan
became increasingly
commercialized, Tsuge's works also began to change in appearance,
focusing and
strengthening its criticisms. While his earlier works contain
idealized elements of rural
Japan, these later works deromanticize the rural through bleak
depictions that Tsuge
described as " Riarizumu" ( Realism). However, his
underlying message, that urban and
rural Japan are fundamentally different places and that an urban
interloper cannot
integrate into rural Japan, remained the same.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………1
Chapter 1:
Background……………………………………………………………………8
Chapter 2: Social Solitude and Mental Oppression in Tsuge's City
Stories……………..25
Chapter 3: Early Rural Works: Criticized
Idealism………………………………………41
Chapter 4: Later Rural Works: A Refocused
Criticism…………………………………..55
Conclusion and Directions for Further
Research………………………………………...72
Endnotes………..………………………………………………………………………..74
Works Cited and
Referenced………………………………………………………….…76
List of Figures
Figure 1: Dense, confining paneling in
"Chiko"………………………………………....29
Figure 2: Separation between the lead characters in "Umibe no
Jokei"…………………33
Figure 3: The final image in "Umibe no
Jokei"………………………………………….33
Figure 4: Faceless characters and empty backgrounds in "Yume no
Sanpo"…………....37
Figure 5: The final panel of "Yoru ga
Tsukamu"………………………………………..39
Figure 6: Dense, detailed, near-alien foliage in "Akai
Hana"……………………………49
Figure 7: The protagonists of "Akai Hana" (left) and "Mokkiriya no
Shōjo" (right)……52
Figure 8: Sayoko in "Akai Hana" (left), Chiyoji in "Mokkiriya no
Shōjo" (right)………52
Figure 9: The opening image of
"Nejishiki"……………………………………………..60
Figure 10: Modern and rural collide in
"Nejishiki"……………………………………...60
Figure 11: Tsuge's imagined inn and the inn of "realism" in
"Riarizumu no Yado"…….63
Figure 12: Tsuge's protagonist as
observer………………………………………………69
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