Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast episode 620, The Manga Revolution, Part 2.

I think it's fair to say that even if the terms they used would not have been recognizable to us,

by the 1800s, Japan had a thriving market for comics more so than anywhere else in the world.

As we've established, those comics would not be called manga, indeed they wouldn't

even really be thought of as being a part of a single genre.

Mixing images and text in order to tell a story was simply how it was done, across a wide

variety of media.

Very few works were absolutely pure literature in the sense of just being words with no pictures.

A wide proliferation of genres mixed images and text from the Kusa Zoshi, the colloquial

books for mass markets, to Otogizoshi, supernatural stories, like the illustrated Nara

Ehon, the book of Nara, that tells the origin

of the legend behind the summertime Tanabata festival to simple Ukio a prince depicting

famous Kabuki actors with scenes and lines from their plays.

My favorite example of this, honestly, are the images of Yakub Yolgami, the god of disease whose image, alongside text

naming specific diseases, and offering just general medical advice, was thought to ward off illness

if hung inside the home.

All of these works could be one or two illustrated pages like most Ukioe.

They could be 20 or 30, like Minikuzasoshi, or by the late

1800s, hundreds of pages.

The popular characters from these stories, like the Playboy Enjiro, created by the same

Santo Kilden we talked about last week, or the supernatural Tovo Kozo, literally Tofu

Boy, a yokai, a sort of spirit, in the form of a boy holding a

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