Manga and The Great East Japan Earthquake

I wanted to faithfully depict the situation of the disaster and thought that manga was well suited to the task due to its “sloppiness,” as it doesn’t take as long as a film to make and it allows for a good amount of visual variation.

During that time, I was pondering what sort of story about the disaster should I leave behind for future generations two or three decades down the line, but I had no ideas. Then I thought, it’s fine to have no ideas. I tried to be as candid as possible in depicting what I felt at each moment in time.

What I’ve collected in "Ano-hi kara no Manga" can be thought of as “fragments” or “seeds” of stories that I felt at the time I created them.

What about yourself changed before and after the disaster?

I myself don’t know—could you tell me? (Laughs). If I had to answer that, I would say before the disaster, since around the mid-1980s, I disliked the state of feverish frenzy we were in and wanted to get people to loosen up and cool down through my manga. From around the 1990s, more and more of my works had hopeless, unhappy endings, as though to say, “we can’t go on like this.” Then the disaster happened. That time was the only time I wanted to depict hope.

In my manga, I wanted to depict the message that “the future will be so much brighter,” like the vision we had when we were kids. But ultimately, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t come to any conclusion other than to leave the future up to the children.

The feeling that “we lost a huge bet”

In an essay about my experience volunteering at the site of the disaster, I wrote, “We lost a huge bet.” That is, we bet on the side that said a disaster on the scale of what happened on March 11 would never occur, and we lost. Even now, Japan keeps on losing its bets—the bet that this virus wouldn’t spread, the bet that the Olympics would revive the economy.

Before you know it, we’ll be dead broke. What will we bet on next? Maybe we’re betting that our everyday lives will remain the same and we’ll continue to lose in a changing world.

What’s the significance of publishing comic strips in the newspaper?

I want to depict the times, and this has been true of me since way back when. I’m not really good at depicting the story of some character’s life. That’s why I’m happy I’ve been able to create strips for the newspaper.

I think people who regularly read the newspaper have a higher-than-usual interest in society and want to be of use to the rest of the world in some way, shape, or form.

That’s why I made the “Chikyū-Bōei-ke” [“Earth Defense Family”] the heroes of the series—the people in this family want to do something, but basically all they do is watch the news on TV without taking action. It’s also a projection of myself, of how I’m unable to form a firm opinion and translate it into action.

Does drawing manga change anything in reality?

Ultimately, I want the world to remain trivial—like a rascal child doing something silly to get a reaction out of his parents. Living while being scolded and laughing. I want it to be a pressure-free world that accepts this sort of trivial way of life. However, for that to be allowed, the world would have to continue being rich and stable, so that’s the hard part.

Looking at my own kids, they’re obsessed with the world of stories, whether it’s manga or cosplay or 2.5-dimensional culture. For them, I think it’s not necessarily an escape from reality, but rather their own way of perceiving reality. But for old folks like me, we can’t see that, and it makes us uneasy.

Manga linked to reality

“Yajikita in DEEP” (2001) is a manga I created while being particularly conscious of “reality.” When I thought about “what is reality?” it became apparent that people’s consciousnesses are not so straight-forward, after all.

Everyone’s living through several complex layers at the same time. In “Yajikita in DEEP”, I thought I would try to express that complexity, rather than ignoring it.

Even if I just extracted the most convenient aspects of it and tried to depict it in a way that was easy to understand, it seemed like a lie… I want to show that a lot of things, such as good and evil, are not fixed, but it’s not easy to depict that in an interesting way.

The “lightness” of Shiriagari’s works

But I want to keep things light. I’m now 62 years old and I’ve done manga, art, and all sorts of things, but I think all of them have been half-assed.

I sometimes think, “What in the world have I been living for?” Things became better when I began thinking instead, “No—I’m here on a tour to see the sights.” I participated in the Parenting Experience Tour and even did the Become-a-Manga-Artist-and-Publish-a-Book Tour (laughs). I can’t deny the feeling of “fun” I felt moment-to-moment in the midst of these experiences. I’m sure I’ll continue on living by hunting for those small flecks of joy in life.