Popular Culture: Manga

The Granny series appeals to readers of all ages and generations, but especially to adult children taking up residence with their aging parents. They often find catharsis in reading this manga that allows them to laugh at the compromises in their own daily lives. It appeals to them because it points honestly to the hypocrisy and fakeness of respect for elders and filial piety that are part of Japanese formal family life. By calling the bluff of the "respect for elders," Granny exposes the emptiness of authority in that area.

Japan's Manga Subculture

Japanese family manga such as Maruko and Granny retain wide popular appeal because they go beyond the rudimentary surface of Japanese life, and touch an emotional chord that engages the readers comfortably and lightheartedly. The funniest manga often pierce through formalities and stereotypical expectations, allowing readers to let their hair down and put their feet up and to share a laugh. It is here, backstage, that manga readers share honest emotions because they know that everyone feels awful when living in the pressure-cooker of school exams, or when socially discarded in any sphere of life. Manga can therefore take the readers beyond "proper" life, and beyond what is projected in the world of high culture.

The best-written manga promote not only humor but also self-understanding. They can be a source of identity, and also a fictive world of identification. Today, young Japanese adults and children can be greatly influenced by this fictive world that offers a space for frank discourse, a safety zone to talk about anything on any topic from sex to violence to war. In the manga subculture, people can connect directly and indirectly with their peers, creating a world of their own which is impenetrable by parents, teachers, and other authority figures. It is safe here to caricature authority-teachers, police officers, and even the prime minister.

Because of its origin as cheap, accessible entertainment created by individual artists before television became widely available, manga has had an aura of counterculture for a long time. However, as the industry grew over the decades, generating increasing disposable income for children, the manga industry was also appropriated by mainstream Japanese society as a medium to promote conservative messages and as a vehicle to make handsome business profits. As the efficient and wide diffusion of cultural messages and instruction becomes more and more important in rational society, manga has become a vital means to facilitate cultural socialization (such as family values or military values) and even political ideology (such as support for the Liberal Democratic Party prime minister [Fig 3]) As a commercial phenomenon, on the other hand, manga characters are often the key to marketing commodities, which doubles or triples the cultural consumption value of manga entertainment.

Akiko Hashimoto

Akiko Hashimoto (retired) was Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. Her areas of interest are cultural sociology, comparative and global sociology, collective memory and national identity, generational and cultural change, family and education, aging and social policy.