Bibliography

Overview

Mizuki Shigeru was one of the greatest cartoonist to ever put pen to page. He reintroduced yokai back into contemporary Japanese society and introduced yokai into the entertainment world with his mangas. His works have also inspired sources of entertainment in both Japanese and Western culture, cartoons such as Pokemon, Digimon and films such as My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away have been worked on by the hands of Mizuki (Davission). Giant robots versus giant monsters battles that are seen in Pacific Rim and Neon Genesis Evangelion have all taken inspiration from the first few pages of Mizuki’s Gegege No Kitaro (Davisson).

Starting his career in 1957, he debuted with Rocketman later releasing his most popular manga to date Gegege no Kitaro in the 1960s (Davisson). He had spent decades collecting stories of yokai and illustrating them because he wished Japanese yokai, previously described as grotesque and scary, “... to be loved like fairies “. He wished for parents and children in Japan and across the world to enjoy yokai as he did when he was a child. Mizuki not only wrote cartoons and manga just about yokai, but also drew about his life, war and other folklore. He wrote and illustrated a twelve volume series of world folklore called Mujara which earned him membership in the Japanese society of Cultural Anthropology (Davisson). He also published the comic Japan and War in Shogaku rokunen-sei for the purpose of educating elementary children about the sins Japan committed during World War II (Davisson). Not only did he criticize Japan, but in Kitaro’s Vietnam War Diary he used his popular characters to denounce America’s involvement in the Vietnam War (Davisson). He had also won awards such as the Kodansha Manga Award and the Grand Prix for Best Comic at the Angoulême International Comics Festival, the first Japanese creator to take the honor (Davisson).

Author and political commentator Roland Kelts described Mizuki as “an artist unique unto to himself - who defines his own genre and is beyond comparison”; for such a significant man in Japanese culture I wish to explore his life and manga along with the cultural effects of them.

Early Life

Mizuki was born Mura Shigeru in 1922. He was born in Osaka, but later moved to Sakaiminato which was where his family was originally from (Foster 62). It was there where he learned of yokai from old woman named Nonnonba who used to look after him when his parents were busy (Foster 62). It was common of pre-war Japan to pass down stories of yokai by oral storytelling especially in rural areas as the one Mizuki grew up in. Along with learning the local storytelling culture Mizuki’s father was extremely interested in international culture, especially film, he purchased the town’s first movie projector which he hoped would connect his family and the neighbors to new era of movies (Palmer). The combined exposure of both local and global storytelling culture along with his appreciation of yokai made him eager to present his knowledge on a world wide scale.

Before unleashing his talent to the world, in 1943 he was drafted into the Japanese imperial army at the age of 21 (Suzuki 321). Mizuki was then sent off to Rabaul, a port village in the South Pacific where he barely survived World War II. He described in his memoir Onward to Our Noble Deaths that he had experienced the worst of the Pacific front. He wrote how the soldiers were unwilling as well as starving and disease ridden, were sent on suicide runs by officers who punished the soldiers with severe beatings if they saw even a hint of reluctance. Mizuki’s entire squad was once ordered on a suicide march with no other purpose than an honorable death. It was then he lost his left arm by a bombing of the Allied Forces. Although he did not wish to, he returned to Japan to seek medical treatment, which was suffering from extreme poverty at the time (Suzuki 231). Mizuki had loved being on the small island and it was there where he saw the yokai Nurikabe (Plaster Wall), and it was also after that experience that he discovered his interest for yokai (Papp 53). After recovery, Shigeru did many different jobs to make ends meet. He then began drawing pictures for kamishibai (paper theater), a form of storytelling with illustrated slides for children. Soon after, he began drawing manga for kashihon rental bookstores, which were similar to today’s DVD rental shops where a customer could rent a book at a small fee (Suzuki 321). With the decline of the kashihon industry because of the television, Mizuki was recruited by editor Nagai Katsuichi who founded a Japanese alternative magazine called Garo in 1964 (Suzuki 321). This alternative manga allowed artists creative freedom and the ability to explore social and political themes in their works, unlike other manga magazines during the time.

Mizuki’s commercial success came around the time of a rapid economic growth in Japan. In 1965 Mizuki’s work Terebi-kun (TV-kun) , which won him the respectable Kōdansha Children Manga Award, made its way into a mainstream manga magazine called Shonen Magazine (Suzuki 321). Since then, with multiple recurrent animes and film adaptations, his mangas remain popular today.

Gegege no Kitaro and its Success

As a kamishibai artist in 1954, Mizuki created the main character of his successful manga, the yokai boy Kitaro (Foster 63). The original production called Hakaba Kitaro (Graveyard Kitaro), changing to its successful series name in 1968, Hakaba no Kitaro (Kitaro of the Graveyard) was going to be made into an anime for television (Foster 63). The sponsors of the television show were concerned about how the word graveyard in the title because they thought it would be bad for business, so Mizuki changed it to Gegege no Kitaro. Gegege was derived from his own nickname as a child, Gege or Gegeru (a mispronunciation of Shigeru) (Foster 63). This caused the title of the anime and the manga to be Gegege no Kitaro (Foster 63).

The black and white anime ran until 1969, followed by successive series in color: 1971-1972, 1985-1988, 1996-1998, and 2007-2009 (Foster 63). There was also a live action film directed by Motoki Katsuhide in 2007, video games, and a brand new TV anime series based on an early version of Hakaba Kitaro (Foster 63). Through these popular forms of media, Mizuki has been able to bring back the popularity of yokai in Japanese pop culture through many generations.

With so many variations of Gegege no Kitaro throughout the decades, the main characters and themes of the show have stayed the same. The show and manga follows the adventures of a boy named Kitaro and his yokai friends. Kitaro is the offspring of a ghost family, but other than that he is a normal looking kid, he wears magic geta sandals and a protective black and white chanchanko vest and he always has hair covering the left side of his face (Foster 63). To remind the viewers of his origins, Kitaro is written with the character for oni (ki) which is a yokai that are supernatural demons, devils or orges (Foster 63). Kitaro is also seen with another character called Medama-oyaji (Papa Eyeball), an eyeball with arms, legs and a squeaky voice (even though he has no mouth), who represents Kitaro’s dead father (Foster 63). In many of the episodes Kitaro and his yokai friends fight evil humans and evil yokai to keep good in the world.

As Mizuki had used the the character for oni (ki) in his name for viewers to remember his origin, he also used Buddhist texts to inspire his backstory. Mentioned earlier, Kitaro is a yokai boy, this is because he was born in a graveyard to an already dead mother and loses one of his eyes. With medieval Buddhist texts, children born in graveyards have significance and were subject to popular stories during the time. The Kumano Honji, which is a illustrated otogizoshi scroll, narrates a story of Gosuiden, a concubine of an Indian king (Papp 58). She is sent to the mountains to be decapitated by her jealous rival’s henchmen, but she is pregnant and when she dies the baby keeps growing until a holy man finds her. The husband finds her body and cuts open her stomach and from it a beautiful boy appears. Due to this tale, the medieval Japanese believed that babies could keep developing in the womb of the dead mother and that they could be buried in graveyards as long as the fetus was not removed before the burial (Papp 58). Another medieval Buddhist tale called Koya Monogatari tells the tale of a young wife murdered and buried in an unmarked grave at a local cemetery. Her ghost appears to a visiting monk and she gives him a robe with a message written in blood that says, “A child who dies in the womb is heavily burdened with obstacles to salvation. Hurry and dig up my body, remove the child from my womb, and give it a funeral” (Papp 58). The texts claims that a birth outside the borders of civilization and in a graveyard will cause the delivery of an extraordinary child (Papp 58). With these texts in mind, Kitaro’s background story connects to the early yokai / ghost texts of medieval Japan and it shows why he has the purpose of protecting the world from bad yokai. In addition to having his original characters, like Kitaro, Mizuki often took inspirations for characters from other folklorists for his yokai.

Mizuki's inspiration from other folklorists

Although in modern Japan Mizuki was seen as a comic book artist, he was also a folklorist who took inspiration from past yokai and folklorists for his works. One of the folklorists he took inspiration from is 18th century ukiyo-e artist Toriyama Sekien. He lived during the Edo period in Japan which was a time where yokai grew in popularity due to the rise in publication culture (Suzuki 232). Sekien had famously collected folklore stories and illustrated yokai in The Illustrated Demon’s Night Parade as known as Gazu Hyakkiyagyo, he is significant because he gave visuals to the yokai that only existed in oral form (Suzuki 232). Each page of these yokai catalogs included the history and description of the yokai and a visual. Through mass production of that time, Sekien had popularized yokai to urban audiences, similar to what Mizuki had done with manga and television. The rise of yokai in the Edo period is a product of the mixture of urbanity and locality, urbanity because of rise of publication and mass production in urban areas and locality because a majority of yokai had come from local rural folklore (Suzuki 232).

Yokai culture as always been tied to premodern, irrational and superstition, and it almost completed died out due to the enlightenment period of Japan, but due to rural areas where Mizuki lived yokai have been able to passed down and live on. In this context, it can be said that because Mizuki lived in Sakaiminato he was able ignite the popularity of yokai as seen in the Edo period (Suzuki 232).

Similar to the Edo period, Mizuki’s depictions of yokai are monstrous with abnormal bodies and otherworldliness (Suzuki 232). In Western tradition, monsters have a boundary between them and humans or there is boundary between them and the monster world (Suzuki 232). So, when the boundary is broken chaos is caused and the monster must be put back in its place so the world can have balance again. Yet in Mizuki’s works there is no boundary, monsters appear beside humans and live in the same world as them (Suzuki 232). His characters also have humorous and loveable traits, making them seem cute, which allows the reader or viewer to have a enjoyable relationship with the monster instead of one that is fearful. His characters are loved by modern Japan as seen by the merchandise and statues on “Mizuki Shigeru’ road” in his hometown.

Mizuki had also used characters from Yanagita Kunio’s glossary of yokai for characters in his mangas. Yanagita Kunio (1875 - 1962), similar to Sekien and Mizuki, had set out to collect yokai to preserve the history of these tales (Foster 10). Yanagita’s most well known work, Yokai meii or Yokai glossary was published over the course of several months between the years of 1938-1939 (Foster 10). These texts describe yokai from all over Japan, with yokai coming from local stories or folklore collections. As Mizuki and Toriyama sought out to do, Yanagita hoped to preserve these stories for the hopes of keeping an authentic Japan when it entered the 20th century. Both folklorists turned rural oral stories into popular characters with faces and bodies which allowed Mizuki to continue to protect yokai for future generations.

Mizuki's yokai

Although many of the characters of Gegege no Kitaro such as Kitaro and Medama-oyaji are original characters, a vast majority of his characters come from Yanagita and Toriyama’s glossaries. An example of this would be with the yokai Sunakake-babaa with the literal translation in Japanese being “sand-throwing old woman”. Yanagita explains in his entry that “ [She is] said to be found in various places in Nara Prefecture. [She] threatens people by sprinkling sand on them when [they] pass through such places as the shadows of a lonely forest of a shrine. Although nobody has ever seen her, it is said that she is an old woman”. Although this yokai is never seen, Mizuki puts her under the spotlight by adding her to his popular manga (Foster 14).

Another yokai Mizuki uses in his manga is Nurikabe or Plaster wall, which is the creature he saw during his time at war. In Yanagita’s collection, Nurikabe is the phenomenon of when you are walking alone at night and suddenly a wall appears in front of you and you can not move. Mizuki turns this phenomenon into an image of a rectangular block with eyes, arms, legs, and a personality. By adding visuals to his characters as Toriyama did, he makes them recognizable characters in popular culture (Foster 14).

The antagonist of the manga and animation who is half yokai and half human is Nezumi Otoko also known as Ratman. His character which represents corruption and spiritual impurity connects to the traditional rat yokai, Bake Nezumi. One of the rat yokai in the tradition is the Tesso which is seen in Toriyama Sekien’s Gazu Hyakkiyagyo, based on the late Heian period legend (Papp 60). According to the tale, the emperor requested Raigo, the high priest of Mii temple, to pray for the birth of a male heir, which the priest complied and a boy was born shortly after. However, the emperor failed to return his side of the deal which was the renovation of the temple (Papp 60). Raigo pledged to have revenge, put a curse on the crown prince and starved himself to death. His vengeful spirit (onryo) entered the body of the rat monster named Tesso and then entered the Mii temple with 84,000 rats and destroyed all the valuable scrolls and Buddhist scripts of the temple (Papp 60). Sekien depicts the Tesso as a rat with a human face, wearing the robes and has the hairline of a Buddhist priest (Papp 60). Based on the 84,000 rats that appear in this tale, the motif of packs of rats appear in Edo period woodblocks as “a symbol of deterioration and filfth and to signal the present of a threatening supernature force” (Papp 60). Also a reccuring theme in Edo period narrative prints is a pack of rats surrounding a human during an act of revenge.

While the rat yokai is associated with attacking the weak, revenge, filth, and impurity, the yokai does not represent a threatening supernatural power, which is seen in Mizuki’s Ratman. Nezumi Otoko is similar to the Edo period’s rat yokai as he acts as “a catalyst for yokai” and triggers the presence of the yokai world (Papp 61). Mizuki’s Ratman also acts as mocking response to the narrative picture scroll, Nezumi Soshi. The scroll recounts the story of the Gonno Kami, a rat monster who wishes to marry a human in order to elevate his descendants to a higher plane of existence (Papp 61). His wish is granted after a prilgrimage to Kyoto’s Kiyomizu Temple when he transformed into a human and proposes to a women(Papp 62). Yet, as the wedding ceremony is taking place a cat recognizes his true form which causes his wish to never come true (Papp 62). This is relevant to Nezumi Otoko because he is the result of Gonno’s tale. He got his wish of half-rat and half-human descendants, but they will never be elevated to a higher existence, which both fulfills and makes fun of the story.

Mizuki's impact on Japanese society

With his mangas and animes, Mizuki has brought worldwide attention on Japanese yokai. He has made a subject of the past into one of the most popular elements of modern Japanese society. In the past, the Japanese have tried to hide their love of the supernatural because they believed it to be embarrassing, but because of Mizuki people can now openly demonstrate their affections. During the summer festival Obon, the Japanese celebrate their ancestors. It is Buddhist - Confucian holiday that is similar to a family renioun and the family must travel to their family member’s graves and clean them up, in the past they only welcomed their ancestors but since the creation of Gegege no Kitaro, they also welcome other yokai (Lee 576). Since Gegege no Kitaro’s popularity in the 1960s, many other popular yokai types of media have been released, popular examples being Pokemon and Yokai Watch have taken over Japan and the world, and various types of manga, anime, and video games have used yokai as the main theme (Foster). Also more scholars have taken it upon themselves to learn more about yokai and rural folk stories since the yokai boom created by Mizuki. Most noteably would be Komatsu Kazuhiko, he is a scholar of folklore and anthropology who has written numerous works on yokai and has used his studies across multiple disaplines (Foster). In 2016, he was named by the Japanese government as a Bunka korosha or a person who has made significant cultural contributions (Foster). With this acknowledge, it shows how noteworthy and important yokai is in Japanese society. Lastly, there is the world of “yokai lovers” who from all around the world are immersed in yokai. They are involved with producing yokai related goods, such as manga, figurines, short stories and songs; they sell these items at conventions and meet-ups with friends and fans (Foster). Some enthusiasts dress up as the yokai themselves.

Without the work of Mizuki Shigeru, none of these elements of Japanese society would have existed. It is important to look back on the life of this man because his works have allowed the Japanese to take pride in a past they were once ashamed of and the world to pay more attention to the history of Japan.