:: WEEK SIX | JAPANESE LANGUAGE COURSE FOR BEGINNERS in London - with Guest Speaker: "Japanese Manga!!!"
Week Six Japanese Language Element:
On successful completion of the class, students will be able
to:
Ask specific questions such as the colour
of an item, the country of origin and material
Buy several items of the same product
Understand nouns: Kono, Ano, Sono
Understand the Hiragana H-Line
Count from one to sixty with no
hesitation!
Say the days of the week along with the
months of the year and be able to say your birth date
To enrol for just this class or the entire course please click here:
Week Six Japanese Cultural Element > Japanese Manga and
Anime!!! <
Anime is the Japanese animation (video), taken from the word
'animation' whilst Manga refers to Japanese comics (magazines).
The Japanese word manga, when translated literally, means "whimsical pictures". The word first came into common usage in the late 1880s with the publication of works like Santō Kyōden's picturebook "Shiji no yukikai" (1797), and in the early 19th century with works like Aikawa Minwa's "Manga hyakujo" (1814) and the celebrated Hokusai manga with drawings from the sketchbook of the famous ukiyo-e artist Hokusai. The first person to use the word "manga" was Rakuten Kitazawa.
In Japan, people of all ages read manga widely. The genre includes a broad range of subjects: action-adventure, romance, sports and games, historical drama, comedy, science fiction and fantasy, mystery, horror, sexuality, and business and commerce, among others. Since the 1950s, manga have steadily become a major part of the Japanese publishing industry. A manga artist (mangaka in Japanese) typically works with a few assistants in a small studio and is associated with a creative editor from a commercial publishing company.
Modern manga originated in the Occupation (1945-1952) and post-Occupation years (1952-early 1960s), while a previously militaristic and ultra-nationalist Japan rebuilt its political and economic infrastructure. There was an explosion of artistic creativity in this period from manga artists such as Osamu Tezuka (Astro Boy) and Machiko Hasegawa (Sazae-san).
Astro Boy quickly became (and remains) immensely popular in Japan and elsewhere. Tezuka and Hasegawa were both stylistic innovators. In Tezuka's "cinematographic" technique, the panels are like a motion picture that reveals details of action bordering on slow motion as well as rapid zooms from distance to close-up shots. This kind of visual dynamism was widely adopted by later manga artists. Hasegawa's focus on daily life and on women's experience also came to characterize later shōjo manga. Between 1950 and 1969, increasingly large audiences for manga emerged in Japan with the solidification of its two main marketing genres, shōnen manga aimed at boys and shōjo manga aimed at girls.
In 1969, a group of female manga artists later called the Year 24 Group (also known as Magnificent 24s) made their shōjo manga debut (year 24 comes from the Japanese name for 1949, the birth-year of many of these artists). The group included Hagio Moto, Riyoko Ikeda, Yumiko Oshima, Keiko Takemiya, and Ryoko Yamagishi and they marked the first major entry of women artists into manga. Thereafter, shōjo manga would be drawn primarily by women artists for an audience of girls and young women. In the following decades (1975-present), shōjo manga continued to develop stylistically while simultaneously evolving different but overlapping subgenres.[39] Major subgenres include romance, superheroines, and "Ladies Comics" (in Japanese, redisu レディース, redikomi レディコミ, and josei 女性).
Modern shōjo manga romance features love as a major theme set into emotionally intense narratives of self-realization. With the superheroines, shōjo manga saw releases such as Naoko Takeuchi's Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon, which became internationally popular in both manga and anime formats. Groups (or sentais) of girls working together have also been popular within this genre.
Manga for male readers sub-divides according to the age of its intended audience: boys up to 18 years old (shōnen manga) and young men 18- to 30-years old (seinen manga); as well as by content, including action-adventure often involving male heroes, slapstick humor, themes of honor, and sometimes explicit sexuality. The Japanese use different kanji for two closely allied meanings of "seinen"-青年 for "youth, young man" and 成年 for "adult, majority"-the second referring to sexually overt manga aimed at grown men and also called seijin ("adult," 成人) manga.Shōnen, seinen, and seijin manga share many features in common.
