Kitazawa Rakuten

Kitazawa Rakuten ( Japanese 北 澤 楽 天 ; born July 20, 1876 in Ōmiya (today: Ōmiya-ku , Saitama ), Saitama Prefecture , Japan ; † August 25, 1955 ) was a Japanese manga artist and caricaturist .

Together with Okamoto Ippei (1886–1948) he made the American cartoon style known in Japan. He saw drawing comics not only as an intermediate stage on the way to real art and, together with Okamoto, was the first draftsman to call himself “Mangashi” (“Manga teacher”). His comic strips were political and criticized society and government with humor.

biography

Fukuzawa Yukichi , who played an important role in the modernization of Japan, is said to have advised Kitazawa, when he was around twenty years old, to create images based on Western cartoons . Kitazawa worked from 1895 for the weekly published in Yokohama , English-language magazine Box of Curious and from 1899 as a picture editor for Fukuzawa's newspaper Jijishimpō , for which he worked until 1932. There he learned his trade, among others from the Australian painter Frank A. Nankivell .

A page from Tagosaku to Mokube no Tōkyō Kembutsu , 1902

In 1902 he created under the influence of North American comic strips by, for example, Richard Felton Outcault , Rudolph Dirks and Frederick Opper , which reached its peak at this time, the comic strip series Tagosaku to Mokube no Tōkyō Kembutsu (dt. About " Tagosaku and Mokube on a tour of Tokyo “ ) For the Sunday supplement of Jijishimpō , Jiji Manga . Although Kitazawa did not use speech bubbles in it, Tagosaku to Mokube no Tōkyō Kembutsu is considered the first serial comic strip in Japan.

In 1905 Kitazawa founded his own satirical magazine, Tōkyō Puck ( 東京 パ ッ ク ), named after the US magazine Puck , whose circulation was around 100,000 and through which it should gain a high degree of popularity. Japanese cartoonists found a place in Tōkyō Puck to bring their works to the public. The yonkoma manga in English, Chinese and Japanese are devoted to current, international issues in politics. Due to the success of Tōkyō Puck , which was also published in other Asian countries, Kitazawa founded other satirical magazines. Around 1912 he devoted himself instead of Tōkyō Puck to the bi-weekly successor Rakuten Puck ( 楽 天 パ ッ ク ). However, this could not build on the success of Tōkyō Puck and was discontinued soon afterwards.

In the late 1920s, he toured Europe and the United States. In Paris in 1929 there was even an exhibition of his works.

Kitazawa trained many young illustrators and founded a school in 1934 that specialized in comic and caricature art. In 1948, when Osamu Tezuka was able to post successes with his story manga that slowly supplanted the yonkoma manga , he retired. Seven years later, at the age of 79, he died of a cerebral haemorrhage .

In his honor, a museum was built in his hometown Ōmiya in 1966, which was integrated into the prefecture capital Saitama in 2001 .

Works (selection)

• Tagosaku to Mokube no Tōkyō Kembutsu ( 田 吾 作 と 杢 兵衛 の 東京 見 物 )
• Haikara Kidorō no Shippai ( 灰 殻 木 戸 郎 の 失敗 )
• Chame to Dekobo ( 茶 目 と 凸 坊 )
• Donsha
• Kokoro no Runpen ( 心 の ル ン ペ ン )
• Teino Nukesaku ( 丁野 抜 作 )
• Tonda Haneko ( と ん だ は ね 子 )

literature

• Frederik L. Schodt : Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics . Kodansha America, 1983, ISBN 0-87011-752-1 (English)

Web links

• Kitazawa in the Comic Encyclopedia (English)