See pictures of the manga that inspired Zinedine Zidane to take up football
As the British Museum’s blockbuster new show on manga opens, GQ sat down with one of the curators to discuss eight of the most striking works included in the exhibition When curator and Japanese art specialist Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere spoke to GQ about the eight images she chose to feature from the British Museum’s upcoming exhibition on manga, the excitement in her voice was palpable. Having worked and lectured on Japanese art spanning centuries ever since gaining her PhD from Harvard in 1998, Dr Rousmaniere knows many of the manga artists exhibited in the show personally. GQ gave her free reign to pick eight examples from the show – the largest on manga outside Japan – that encapsulate the massive reach and cultural influence of the art form, from the comic strip that inspired Zinedine Zidane to play football to the series challenging casual homophobia in contemporary Japanese society.
1/8“I love this! This is a bestselling manga in Japan called Saint Young Men. It's in the top ten bestselling manga. We showed it in 2015, at a small exhibition here at the British Museum called Manga Now. We translated a chapter of it into English and got to know the artist. Kodansha, its publisher, has for the first time convinced the artist bring it out in English.
“[Nakamura Hikaru] is a female artist. She's incredibly witty and a fantastic drawer. The manga that she did before this was called Arakawa Under The Bridge, which followed a group of homeless people in downtown Tokyo and their lives. She went to art school, she has a kind of a quirky understanding of life and she likes to bring [out] the ironies and humour in everyday life. So she decided on Buddha and Jesus, taking a gap year in downtown Tokyo, where she's from in Tachikawa, which is a suburb. They're staying in a really small flat with a shared bath.
“It's basically about getting to know everyday life and living as a commoner – hiding what they are. But they can't hide it, it keeps on coming out. When Buddha gets excited, his third eye glows. And the local people think Jesus is Yakuza or mafia, because of his scars.
“This is a cover illustration. It shows Buddha, [who] gets really interested in drawing manga. He’s kind of obsessional, while Jesus is really happy-go-lucky and open to almost anything. He gets tired easily. And Buddha just really goes for one thing and sticks to it. So he's drawing the manga, but you can see Jesus has fallen asleep. It's early morning and Buddha’s still at it.”
2/8“Captain Tsubasa is from the powerhouse publishing company called Shueisha. Manga is really about sports, in Japan. With the Rugby World Cup, the Olympics and Paralympics, we’ve chosen some wonderful, key sports manga.
“Zidane got into football, he says, because of this anime. Captain Tsubasa was made in the Eighties and it was very quickly adapted into an anime, which was known as Captain Majed. Captain Majed, still, in Syria, in North Africa, has real resonance with people. If you look on Twitter, a number of North African footballers will reference Captain Tsubasa.”
3/8“Blue Giant Supreme is one of my favourites by Ishizuka Shinichi. This is a fantastic manga, about a high school saxophonist from Sendai, where the tsunami was. He loves jazz and his dream is to become a major player, so after he gets out of high school he travels without any money to Frankfurt, somehow falls into a quartet and they travel all around Europe playing jazz in seedy bars.
“If you can look at this image, we have our hero. He's holding the sax and the katakana [the Japanese characters used to write phonetic and foreign words] says baa. The baa I hear is not necessarily the baa you hear. And what's exciting for me about manga as opposed to anime is that this is almost like a symphony in your mind – the sounds I'm experiencing are my sounds.
“Just reading and feeling it, the sax itself almost looks like it's vibrating. The hands are enlarged because it's really focusing on all that movement. All those hand-drawn lines are a shower of sound.”
4/8“This one is by a brilliant artist named Kawanabe Kyosai. Kyosai did ukiyo-e [woodblock prints]. He did traditional painting, Kondo-style painting. He was a man of many trades and he painted this curtain in 1880. The theatre that it comes from is called the Shintomi-za.
“He painted it in four hours and it’s 17 metres long and five metres high. He did it with a huge brush and you can see his foot marks on it. You can see where he put the ink pot down.
“The main figure, with the tongue flicking out, is an actor of a very famous lineage called Ichikawa Danjiro. If we look at this image of him, our head would come, maybe, to where the bottom of his tongue is. He starts off this amazing parade. The premise is that at night, when there's no one around, the costumes take on the spirits of the actors and they come out and play in the theatre. They’re these very Japanese spirits called yokai.
“Manga’s just forming in this period. We're not saying this is manga, but we're saying this is the foundations of manga and manga comes from this. Manga is about storytelling through line, through brush. And Kyosai was the first true modern master of the brush.”
5/8“This was made recently for the British Museum. It’s Chiba’s first rugby picture. He's huge, he's 80 years old and mostly famous for his sports stories. But he’d never done rugby. We challenged him to do a rugby image.
“Chiba watched the Springboks play the Brave Blossoms [the Japanese national rugby team]. He watched the recording of it over and over again. And this is his inspiration from that. The Japanese player, he’s nothing compared to the Springboks. And you see, in the lower corner, he’s trying to hold his corner and you see this incredible force coming at him.
“It's not saying that Japan is number one, it's just saying, ‘Japan is here’. What's really important about sports in Japanese manga, [is that] the stories are always about a disenfranchised or not necessarily a talented [character]... or at least someone from the wrong side of the tracks. American comics about sports are win, win, win! This is not about that. This is often about losing. But it's about developing your own sense of self through teamwork.”
6/8“Takemiya Keiko – she's impressive. She's at the forefront of what is called shoujou, ‘girls’ manga’, as opposed to shounen, ‘boys manga’. She's part of what is known as the Year 24 Group of women who were born in the 24th year of the Japanese reign era called Showa [1949 in Western years]. It's a group of artists, women, that were born around that year who really came together. There was a male dominance [in manga] and what they've done is put women's drawing and women's themes into manga.
“Now, it's always been there, but they reinforced it. Fifty per cent of manga artists – in general, you can't say exactly 50 per cent, but about – are female. Even in pornography, half are female. What we’re trying to do in this exhibition is to, whenever possible, to deal an even hand.
“This one is Takemiya-sensei’s first science fiction. It's called Towards The Terra. In the future, when Earth is too polluted to be habitable, we live on pristine spaceships, hoping to repopulate the Earth. That's the premise. But there's a kind of a subversive group that is trying to break through the government’s regulations and get back to Earth. So this is the story when we see this picture.
“Whereas male manga, shounen manga, is often about action, line and movement, female manga [has] more of these emotional landscapes and character development. And really complex plots, often involving love triangles or complicated human relationships.”
7/8“Hoshino Yukinobu is a star of science fiction. His famous manga is 2001 Nights, but he also does mystery, history and detective [fiction]. This is from his detective stories about Professor Munakata.
“I was teaching in Tokyo in about 2007 or 2008, but working with the British Museum. Neil McGregor, the director, had asked Tim Clark, the head of the Japanese section, to find a manga artist to create a manga for the British Museum.
“Tim asked me to find one. I knew this was the man for the job, but it took me a while to get access to him – I went up to Hokkaido and we convinced him to come twice to the British Museum. He decided to create a series [based] on the Museum, so he created this series that had a circulation of 300,000 in Japan. It's still for sale, called Professor Munakata’s British Museum Adventure.
“We showed him the museum. We introduced him to people: real characters, real curators. The Museum is drawn in a hyper-accurate way and the objects are all spot on. But for the story, it was his story. As I was translating it, I started getting worried, because it's about repatriation. The story is basically: who wants the Rosetta Stone? Who owns these objects? The director wasn’t fussed. He said the artist has to do what the artist wants.
“And it's fascinating. He put all of us in it, we're all actors in this, all the curators – you can see each one of us in there. The story really is gripping and we didn't know what would happen till the end.
“And so that's what we have: Professor Munakata looking out from the steps of the British Museum.”
8/8“Tagame Gengoro is a very powerful artist from a small publishing company called Futabasha. This manga is about addressing homophobia.
"That’s not his real name, that’s his pen name. He’s very much a gay activist and an erotic art specialist. He has many manga, but his other very popular manga, especially among the gay community, is called Pride. We don't show it in the exhibition, because it's quite graphic, but it's incredibly beautifully drawn and it's a sensitive work.
“[My Brother’s Husband] is very important and it's winning a number of prizes already. In Japan, it has caused a huge outpouring of acceptance.
“This buff Japanese guy – and a Tagame speciality is buff men – when this boy was young, he was an identical twin. [One of two] very handsome, young, identical twins whose parents died, so they were orphans. They were very close, but one of them was gay and when he came out to his brother, the brother couldn't accept it. The gay brother emigrated to Canada and got married – was very happy, but tragically died. So the brother’s husband, the Canadian, Mike, decides to visit the twin brother he’s never met.
“While there's a long history of sexual freedom in Japan from early ages, the institutions of marriage and sex are not associated. Marriage is about family and lineage, so you don't come out. People are coming out now, but Japan is slow on that front.
“The husband lands on the doorstep of the twin brother. Meanwhile, the twin brother is estranged from his wife and his raising his five-year-old daughter. Because of Japanese tradition, he has to invite this gay guy into his home with his daughter and it just totally freaks him out.
“Here, he's looking at himself in the mirror in his boxers, after coming out of the bath. Because they’re identical twins, it's hard for the husband, Mike, to look at the spitting image of the dead person he loved. So there’s a number of different complications there. He's thinking, ‘Should I go out in my home, in the hallway, in my underwear?’
“It's all about needless self-censorship and his internal issues. Nothing radical happens: they go to the playground. People around say, ‘Ooh, who is he? What is this relationship?’ But it's on subtle levels that it’s really profound. You understand how prejudice can really affect your worldview, on a micro scale as well as on a macro scale.”
