Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 621, The Manga Revolution, Part 3.

Conventional histories of manga that I have found tend to skip over the time around the Second World War.

After all, there wasn't much time for anything fun when the nation was being mobilized for a possibly suicidal last stand.

They tend to move instead directly from the 1920s into the post-war manga industry.

And there's pretty good reason for that. As we've covered, the manga industry, as we would start to recognize it today,

really comes together in the 1950s, with the beginning of Japan's economic recovery and with some of the properties we'd recognize today.

But if we just went there immediately, we'd be skipping over some important and dramatic changes that I do think set up what comes later.

There are ways, after all, in which the 50s manga industry did build on what came during the Warriors.

And there are ways it didn't, but those divergences are interesting too,

because they show how manga as a modern phenomenon isn't quite as cut off from the wider world of comics as you might think,

and how contingent its history was.

In other words, things did not,

so to speak, have to turn out the way they did. There were other branches the story of manga

could have gone down. So let's talk about the late 30s and early 40s. You may have heard of this

little thing called World War II.

It was kind of a big deal back in its day, like all sequels, bigger and louder,

and yet so derivative you can't even understand the plot without knowing the first one.

I joke, of course, but it's hard for any historian to deny the importance of what still

is the largest conflict in human history.

And the more I've studied, the more I've seen just how much its ripple effects touched basically

every facet of human life.

In the manga industry, for example, we see the same steady path of radicalization that

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