Kissing Scenes in Manga

Pistol Angel  by Osamu Tezuka (Tokodo, 1949) is known as the first work of children’s manga in Japan to depict a kissing scene. In actuality, however, kissing scenes also appeared in shōjo (girls’) magazines before WWII (for instance, in “Pichiko to Chākō [Pichiko and Chako]” by Katsuji Matsumoto, serialized in Shōjo no Tomo, 1933–37), and as such, strictly speaking, it is not the “first.” 

Regardless, this kissing scene, which appears in the depiction of an illicit love affair between an American Indian boy and a cowboy girl, was a big deal at a time when “common sense” dictated that expressing a romantic relationship in a children’s manga was out of the question.

There was no problem when it was a simple greeting, like a kiss between a parent and child, but occasionally manga would depict scenes in which greeting and romantic aspects could not be so easily separated.The kiss in Yasuko Aoike’s debut work “Sayonara Nanette [Goodbye Nanette]” (1963) is used primarily as an expression of gratitude from a girl to the boy who found her precious brooch. 

Even if there were a hint of attraction between the two, the kiss itself contains a subtle ambiguity that does not allow for it to be expressly attributed to romantic feelings. Here, there is clearly a gap between the two characters in terms of how they view the significance of the kiss, and these kinds of gaps subsequently lead to romantic comedy-style misinterpretations.

As we have seen, there are various types of excuses for kissing scenes that exist at the level of the story, such as those that assert the necessity of the kiss, as in mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, those that assert that the kiss was an accident with no further intentions, and those that assert that the kiss meant something else as a Western form of greeting. There are doubtless other patterns that emphasize that the kiss was an unwelcome attempt.

In addition, there is also the method of preparing an excuse at the level of expression by leaving out or hiding the kissing scene so that readers cannot see it, without attempting to justify the existence of the kiss at the level of the story. In “Watashi wa…Tōkyōkko “I am… a Tokyoite]”（1964） by Akira Mochizuki, the artist uses both strategies of concealment: the kiss is presented as an accident resulting from the shaking of a passing train (despite the fact that the kissing scene takes place at the characters’ own wedding), and the view of the kiss itself is left out of the frame, which only shows the two from the knee down. During this period, numerous evasive tactics were already being tried in various forms to avoid public criticism.

Entering the 1970s, artists were no longer required to create special excuses for kissing scenes in shōjo manga. They then moved on to the next stage in which they explored how they could depict bedroom scenes. A representative example of this is the scene in Riyoko Ikeda’s "The Rose of Versailles" (1972), in which Oscar and André consummate their love the night before the last battle of the French Revolution. In their search for how to depict bedroom scenes, artists “discovered” that the issue of sexuality, which is a heavy, serious topic in its own right in people’s actual lives, was something that could be, and should be, expressed in manga.

On the other hand, the opposite direction taken in exploring romance in a comedic framework was not necessarily entirely frivolous. Although the term “romantic comedy” is often used to mean that its contents are meant to be taken as a joke, the popularity of comedy and the spread of manga as a form of popular culture are two sides of the same coin, and neither could have been established in the absence of the other.

The evasive tactics surrounding kissing scenes in the ’60s reappeared, this time as methods of delaying the fulfillment of romantic relationships, and became established as a trope in romantic comedies. Take, for example, this scene in Waki Yamato’s "Haikara-san ga Tōru" [Here Comes Miss Modern] (1975), a monumental work in 1970s romantic comedy. It is set up as a romantic scene in which the male character, facing Benio, the heroine, conveys his feelings for her outright by saying “I liked you.” She, however, stares blankly with her mouth agape and falls out of the tree in the next moment, ruining the mood. Even though, seen objectively, the pair have long known of their feelings for each other, these ludicrous missed opportunities cause delays in the progression of their relationship.

From the end of the ’70s, romantic comedies were transplanted into the world of shōnen manga as well, leading up to the romantic comedy boom of the ’80s typified by Rumiko Takahashi’s “Urusei Yatsura” (1978) and Mitsuru Adachi’s “Touch”(1981). In an early episode of “Urusei Yatsura”, we can even see how tropes from earlier manga became established as fixed formulas in romantic comedy-like scenes. Here, in a variation of the classic trope of a romantic heroine who fails at cooking, the heroine uses alien technology to ruin what should have been food, making everything explode.

Around the same time, in “Weekly Shōnen Jump”, erotic elements began to be depicted in a more natural way using sports as the main subject matter. Tatsuo Kanai’s “Hole in One” (1977)　is a work of manga that frequently depicted scenes in which female characters’ underwear could be seen when the wind blew (the so-called “upskirt” view) while they played golf.These methods of justification for what could be called “legal erotica” inherited the same structure of the evasive tactics used in romantic comedies.