Norakuro and the First Children's Manga Boom

This character is called Norakuro, short for “Norainu (stray dog) – Kuro (black) kichi". These works feature Norakuro, who enlists in the "mōkenrentai" (the Fierce Dog Regiment) and then fails repeatedly and foolishly even as he succeeds ridiculously while waging war against monkeys, pigs, and frogs. The titles of the works change as the titular character is promoted, starting with "Norakuro Nitōsotsu" [Private Second-class Norakuro] and then moving on to "Norakuro Jōtōhei" [Superior Private Norakuro], Norakuro Gochō [Corporal Norakuro] and so forth. This manga was serialized starting in the January 1931 issue of "Shōnen Club" (Dainippon Yūbenkai Kodansha)—a popular magazine at the time with over 500,000 issues in print—and it was a smash hit for which over 100,000 separate books sold as well. "Norakuro" triggered the first children’s manga boom. 

　In addition to serializing "Norakuro", "Shōnen Club"—which increased its circulation under the famous editor-in-chief Kenichi Katō—included a ten-page-plus manga feature at the beginning of each monthly issue, using which the magazine published various short manga stories from an assortment of writers. During a time when novels made up the main contents of magazines for boys and girls, this feature played a roll in increasing the popularity of manga, and competing magazines soon followed suit and published their own manga. 

　Of the works serialized in "Shōnen Club", Keizō Shimada’s "Bōken Dankichi", which was serialized starting in 1933, was the next hit after "Norakuro". This so-called "manga story" depicted the adventures of Dankichi, a Japanese boy who washed up on the shore of a tropical island, and it used the same format as  "Shōchan no Bōken" [The Adventures of Shō-chan], including speech balloons inside the frames that contained lines as well as sentences outside the frames to explain the situation. Although the manga’s format might make it seem like more of a throwback than "Norakuro"—which told its stories with nothing but frames, pictures, and lines in speech balloons—"Bōken Dankichi’s" liberal use of flying sweat and other manga-like symbols actually preempts post-war manga in some ways.

　Spurred on by the roaring success of "Norakuro", a lot of manga books were published in the 1930s. Of the inexpensive publications known as "akahon manga" (red covers), hundreds of titles per year were published with various formats and numbers of pages by publishing companies previously involved in picture books, and these books were distributed not only to general bookstores but also to street stalls, toy stores, general stores, and other stores, thereby enabling children’s manga to circulate all the way to mountain and fishing villages that didn’t even have bookstores.

　"Kodansha no Ehon" was a series of monthly picture books published by Dainippon Yūbenkai Kodansha (currently known as Kodansha) four times per month starting in 1936, and—although these were initially treated as individual paperback books—they became a magazine due to their serial publication somewhere along the way. Of the four books published each month, one was a manga compilation, which is where popular serialized works such as Kennosuke Nīzeki’s "Tora no Ko Torachan" [Tora-chan, the Tiger Cub were born. In fact, it would be no exaggeration to say that Kodansha no Ehon was the best sales monthly manga magazine of the 1930s.

　As was mentioned above, educators started to view the children's manga boom as a problem around 1935. This article was based on an Osaka-based preschool director's research of the homes of students enrolled there, and the article identified both the fact that there were more and more manga books among picture books as well as the content of such manga books as problems. These discussions by educators ultimately led to the "Jidō Yomimono Kaizen ni Kansuru Shiji Yōkō" (Instructional Guidelines on the Improvement of Children’s Reading Materials), which were released by the Home Ministry in October of 1938.