Is This The First Manga?

Whether one can actually call the Chōjū Giga “manga” differs depending on how one looks at the history of what is expressed. If we define the term manga in a certain way and then regard everything that fits our definition as manga, then we can go ahead and call the Chōjū Giga manga as well. However, if we instead argue that the art was a product of the times and focus on how the people back then regarded it, then the Chōjū Giga are not an example of manga. In fact, the word manga itself did not even exist in Japan back then.

In "Nihon Mangashi" [History of Manga], which was written by Seiki Hosokibara in 1924, the theory that “the Chōjū Giga are the oldest example of Japanese manga” was already prevalent, and it’s not clear who was the first person to say this.

eisen Terayama, a journalist for "Jiji Shinpō", provided a preface for Ippyō Mangashu Shohen, in which he wrote the following regarding the history of Japanese art: “Japanese artists have not really mastered the secrets of humorous satirical pictures, but the Chōjū Giga are a notable exception. The manga works of Ippyō, who has learned about western caricatures, are likely to bridge a gap in the history of our art.”

The Sino-Japanese word "manga" originally referred to a type of bird called a spoonbill, and there are examples of such usage in Japan starting in the early 18th century. At the time, the word was pronounced "mankaku, not "manga". Starting around the end of the 18th century, we started to see examples of the word being used to mean free-spirited drawings, but the term still didn’t mean humorous caricatures. The word manga in the "Hokusai Manga" [Hokusai’s Sketches], a series of works by the ukiyo-e artist Hokusai Katsushika, is an example of this earlier usage.

It was only during the Meiji period that both artists and readers became aware of manga as a genre and that it became possible to trace the history of manga as a continuous series of inherited techniques and styles. It was also during this time that people started writing "manga" in various ways, including the use of both katakana and hiragana.At the same time, finding things among various past expressions that fit the definition of a "caricature" as "humorous satire" or that of "comics" as stories told through pictures, words, and frames has nothing to do with what the people of the time were thinking. If we remain cognizant of this and the fact that this is something we’re only doing now, it might lead to creative discoveries.