Yanase Masamu

Yanase Masamu ( Japanese 柳 瀬 正 夢 ; born January 12, 1900 in Ehime Prefecture , † May 25, 1945 in Tokyo ) was a Japanese manga artist and caricaturist .

Born in Ehime Prefecture, he moved to Kitakyushu in 1911 . He later moved to Tokyo in the hope of studying painting, but could not find an apprenticeship position and had to learn his artistic skills himself.

He was a member of the avant-garde group Mavo , which was active in Tokyo from 1923 to 1925. He had already joined the left-wing "Japanese Proteletarian Artists Association" and was involved in the design of several magazines, posters and books for this movement.

In 1920 the daily Yomiuri Shimbun hired him as a cartoonist and comic artist. For these he created some political and satirical works in the style of American cartoons, in which he denounced wealth, war, corruption and capitalism. With Kanemoichi Kyōiku he drew an ideologically motivated parody of the American comic strip series Bringing Up Father by George McManus from 1929 for Yomiuri Shimbun . From 1925 he worked as a cartoonist for Musansha Shimbun , the newspaper of the Communist Party of Japan , which was banned at the time . When this newspaper was banned in 1932, he turned back to working for Yomiuri Shimbun .

Around 1938 Yanase, who was arrested several times in his career, was forced to refrain from political criticism in his publications. Instead, he created illustrations and landscapes for the English-language magazine A Friend of Children .

He died on May 25, 1945 in an air raid on Shinjuku in Tokyo.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://www.artnet.com/library/05/0561/T056135.ASP
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Frederik L. Schodt: Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics . Kodansha America, 1983, ISBN 0-87011-752-1 , p. 51.
3. ↑ http://oohara.mt.tama.hosei.ac.jp/english/explanation.html

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus, Yanase is the family name, Masamu the first name.