Presidential Address: Weapons of the Weak, Weapons

Presidential Address: Weapons of the Weak, Weapons of the Strong-The
Development of the Japanese Political Cartoon
Peter Duus
The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 60, No. 4. (Nov., 2001), pp. 965-997.
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Presidential Address:
Weapons of the Weak,
Weapons of the Strong-The
Development of the Japanese
Political Cartoon
PETER DUUS
1
APPROACH MY TOPIC-THE
DEVELOPMENT of the modern Japanese political
cartoon-with
some trepidation. Humor is a fragile product that can easily be
damaged by academic scrutiny. As Evelyn Waugh once remarked, analyzing humor
is like dissecting a frog-much is learned but in the end the frog is dead. Waugh
was right. Most analyses of humor cannot be read for amusement. On the other hand,
why should they be? If Shakespeare scholars are not expected to write in iambic
pentameter, why should students of humor be expected to keep their readers in
stitches? As the editor of the Internutiondl Journul of Humor Studies recently told a
reporter, "We are not in the business of being funny" ( N e w York Times, 19 December
2000).
In this article I will argue that studying political cartoons, like analyzing humor,
is indeed serious business. The reason is simple. If the joke, as Freud tells us, subverts
psychological control by relaxing the conscious in favor of the unconscious, then the
cartoon subverts political authority by mocking its claims to superiority andlor
legitimacy. Ridicule has always been an important political weapon but it became all
the more powerful in the "age of mechanical reproduction." The printing press
facilitated the dissemination of visual ridicule, allowing the political cartoon to be
produced more rapidly and for a wider audience than ever before. When the cartoonist
portrayed a political figure with his hand in the public till or on the knee of someone
else's spouse, it was difficult for that political figure to maintain his dignity, let alone
command the loyalty, respect, or compliance of his public.
In eighteenth-century England, the political cartoon-or caricature as it was more
commonly known-was a weapon used in the pursuit of personal or partisan vendettas.
Peter Duus is William H. Bonsall Professor of History at Stanford University and Past
President of the Association for Asian Studies. His most recent works include The Abacus and
the Sword: TheJapanese Penetration of Korea, 1895 -1 91 0 (1995); TheJapanese Discovery of America:
A Brief History with Doczlments (1997); and Modern Japun (1998).
This article was originally presented as the Presidential Address to the 531~
Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Chicago, 23 March 2001.
TheJozlrnal of Asian Stzldies 60, no. 4 (November 2001):965-997. O 2001 by the Association for Asian Studies, Inc. Society accepted it, one scholar has observed, as "a corollary to the backbiting of the
salons, and the denigrating gossip of Westminster corridors" (Godfrey 1984, 15). The
services of the caricaturists were often for sale. For a time the brilliant James Gillray,
for example, was employed by the Tory party to make fun of its rivals, the Whigs.
But with the invention of the liberal state, the political cartoon became a weapon
in the battle for public opinion. In an open polity, where, in theory, politics were to
be transparent and the political process was to be visible to the public eye, the political
cartoon became an instrument of "democratic surveillance," to use Michel Foucault's
suggestive phrase (Foucault 1980, 152-54). Cartoonists and caricaturists were
conscious of their role, and to a degree they saw themselves as guardians of the public
good. With his indignant eye, the cartoonist would probe zones of darkness,
corruption, and incompetence. When the public-with the cartoonist's help-could
see the whole of the polity, no official wrongdoing or stupidity would escape its gaze,
and the collective citizenry might even be able to restrain the state from harmful
actions.
At first the gaze as refracted through the eye of the cartoonist was limited to a
small public. The early English political cartoon was an independent medium, a
broadsheet or single sheet print, drawn irregularly and often anonymously and sold
at print shops. The number of prints run from one plate ranged from as little as a
few dozen to as many as a few thousand, but price put them beyond the reach of most
of London's population, who could view them only in window displays (Godfrey 1984,
15- 16). In addition, the language of the cartoon at first was not the language of the
masses but of a cultivated, educated minority able to understand the allusions, the
incongruous connections, and the conundrums that were the stock-in-trade of visual
satire. But with the rise of popular journalism in the mid-nineteenth century, the
cartoon was incorporated into media with wider circulations, such as newspapers,
humor magazines, and journals of opinion, and it finally became embedded in the
everyday political culture of the ordinary citizen.
To be sure, not all political cartoons were satirical or even humorous. A cartoon
might merely summarize a political event, depict a political figure, or comment on a
political situation in a purely descriptive way without being very funny-or without
being funny at all. The essential feature of the cartoon was not what it said but how
it was said. As E. H . Gombrich observed, "It is in the condensation of a complex idea
into one striking and memorable image that we find the appeal of {a) great cartoon"
(Gombrich 1963, 130). Condensation, simplification, distillation-the production of
a visual epigram that provided the reader with concentrated focus on the matter at
hand was what made a cartoon a cartoon. Humor came in when the cartoonist relied
on the unexpected, the incongruous, or the absurd to convey his meaning. And satire
came in when the cartoonist suggested that he and his readers were a righteous "we"
that was superior to a foolish, stupid, or corrupt "them."
Politicians were acutely aware that the cartoon was a weapon that could wound,
if not cripple, and they knew that what most people saw was not their official portraits
but their newspaper caricatures. In 1834, the government of Louis Philippe, the
bourgeois king of France, fined Charles Philipon, the brilliant founder of Le Charivari,
for publishing caricatures that transformed him into a pear, the slang word for
"fathead" (fig. 1). Yet it is the image by which Louis Philippe has been remembered
ever since. And "Boss" Tweed, the Tammany Hall politician whom the cartoonist
Thomas Nast skewered in Harper's Weekly as a vulture picking over the bones of the
New York City treasury, had good reason to fear the impact of the "mechanical
reproduction" of ridicule. "Stop them damn pictures," he is alleged to have told his
one of the cultural imports that came flooding into the country after the opening of
the ports. Historians usually trace the cartoon's introduction into Japan to Charles
Wirgman (1832-91), a former British army officer turned correspondent for the
London Illustrated News, who settled in Yokohama shortly after its opening and began
publishing Japan Punch, a comic magazine that poked fun at life in the port and
caricatured its prominent residents. Copies soon found their way into the hands of
curious Japanese readers, as did other caricatures, satirical prints, and humor
magazines imported from the West.
It is certainly true that Wirgman's magazine gave the Japanese their first word
for cartoon-ponchi-e ("Punch pictures"). But it is also true that the Japanese had little
trouble understanding what political cartoons were all about. During the eighteenth
century, anonymously drawn and mostly wordless comic books called Toba-ehon
("Toba picture books"), named after the putative artist of the humorous C ~ @ giga
E
("frolicking birds and beasts") scroll, circulated widely, and by the early nineteenth
century leading print artists such as Kuniyoshi and Hokusai were producing comical
pictures and visual puzzles in great number and variety (Inagaki 1988; Inagaki and
Isao, 1991). One early Japanese newspaper likened "Punch pictures" to hanjimono
(visual puzzles or rebuses) that relied on elaborate visual puns to convey hidden
meanings (fig. 2). "In the manner of the Toba-e," it observed, "they present amusing
drawings with secret meanings" (Ono 1926, 11). For example, an 1858 hanjimono
guide to the shogunal capital at Edo punned its way through the famous places (meisho)
of the city, simultaneously playing on words and images, sounds and objects (fig. 3).
In the upper right corner of the print, a man with his tongue (shita) pierced by an
arrow (ya), stood for Shitaya, a bucolic northern suburb inhabited by artists and known
for its geisha houses, while in the lower left Nihonbashi, the lively commercial center
of the city, was represented by a set of two (nihon) ladders (hashigo) marked with a
diacritical mark (nigori) indicating that the initial h in hashigo should be voiced as a
b. Other rebuses in the print were less obvious-the man burying a child (ko o umeru)
stood for Koume-but
a reasonably clever denizen of Edo, even an illiterate one,
could have puzzled them out with little trouble (Ishigaki 1988, 128-9). (The Western
reader, unfortunately, would have to engage in laborious bilingual di~section.)~
The meanings hidden in hanjimono prints were intended to amuse, but the
concealment of political meanings in visual art had another purpose. Strategies of
concealment were inevitable in a political culture that drastically restricted the
dissemination of political opinion or political news. From the seventeenth century
onward the Tokugawa shogunate repeatedly issued regulations banning publication
of reports about public figures or ceremonies, conflicts within the aristocracy, public
scandals, illegal vendettas, disasters such as fires, floods, and earthquakes-even
natural anomalies such as maidservants giving birth to colts or mountain monsters
carrying off local children. In the eyes of the Tokugawa authorities, no news was good
news. Rightly, perhaps, they feared that reports of public disturbances or ominous
portents would "sow discord among the people" (Kornicki 1998, 11- 15).
'Rutherford Alcock, the British diplomat, had great difficulty deciphering the meaning
of a Japanese book he had bought that "consisted of a series of illustrated charades and rebuses,
such as Charivari delights in. Many of the drawings, all coloured, are inimitable, both as
drawings and illustrations of popular life and manners. I confess utter incapacity in reference
to the solution of the various ingenious enigmas they are meant to illustrate. I never, in my
life, could guess a conundrum or a rebus, in plain English or French, how much less in 'Japanese
hirakana"' (Alcock 1863, 289).
Figure 2.
From K ~ k oshinbzln, 1868. The caption reads: "A Western
comical picture: Punch picture."
Indeed, the Tokugawa shogunate was so intent on making politics invisible that
it forfeited the opportunity to bind the ruler with his subjects through public andlor
visual displays, as monarchs did in early modern Europe. The Tokugawa shoguns
eschewed the public ceremonies staged by the TudorIStuart courts and the Bourbon
kings as a "theater of power" intended to show their audiences that power and
sovereignty resided not just in the royal office, but in the royal person. Nor did the
shogunate erect any public monuments to living shoguns, hold public shogunal
coronations, or mint any coins with the shogunal visage. Even when the shogun made
one of his rare trips outside Edo castle, the streets were emptied of traffic and the
second stories of houses along the way were vacated. The ruling elite did its best to
remain invisible, hidden from public gaze behind towering gates and high walls that
marked their presence but veiled their persons. In short, they relied on what Timon
Screech has called "an iconography of absence" that buttressed their authority by
concealing it rather than by revealing it (Screech 2000, 111-30).
Figure 3. Edo meisho hanjimono, 1858. By Utagawa Hiroshige 11. The
rebuses stand for the following place names (roughly in order from
upper right to lower left): Shitaya, Kornagome, Edobashi, Dangozaka,
Yarnaya, Negishi, Senjii, Akabane, Fukagawa, Shirogane, Ryogoku,
Susaki, Hanakawado, Kourne, Imado, Kurarnae, and Nihonbashi.
DEVELOPMENT O F JAPANESE POLITICAL C A R T O O N
Figure 4.
971
From Hokzsai manga, 1834. By Katsushika Hokusai
A vigorous commercial publishing industry, fueled by rising literacy and
unencumbered by official patronage or close ties with the authorities, made it difficult
for officials to curb public demand for political news, gossip, and commentary,
particularly in Edo and other large urban centers. This demand was satisfied in the
main by illicit or informal media-rumor, graffiti, privately circulated manuscripts,
and anonymous news sheets. But the administrative entropy of the regime also
encouraged a subversive new playfulness in visual culture.
The samurai class, with their high social pretensions and weakening economic
position, was often the butt of visual ridicule. In the late eighteenth century, the
Toba-ehon spoofed drunken, pompous, and posturing samurai. By the early nineteenth
century satirical comment on the status hierarchy became more pointed. For example,
the 1834 volume of Hokusai's Manga included an illustration of a high-ranking
samurai relieving himself in a roadside privy as his servants sit by holding their noses
(fig. 4). Whatever the artist's intention, the picture conveyed a clear message: despite
their affectation of superiority, at some basic level (in the privy, for example) the
samurai were no different from commoners.
If we are to judge from the diary of Fujioka Yoshiz6, a bookseller and avid collector
of gossip, a robust market for visual satire was flourishing on the eve of the Perry
expedition. Of the twenty-eight prints mentioned in the diary as being most talked
about during the Ka'ei period (1848-54), about two-thirds dealt not with the usual
subjects-beautiful courtesans, kabuki actors, samurai heroes, landscapes, and birds
and flowers. Instead they offered comment, often satirical, on current affairs. More
than half were illicit publications that bore no censorship seal (urutumein)and therefore
had to be sold under the counter. To the authorities it seemed that the more scandalous
the print was, the better it sold (Minami 1999, 1-7).
Although publishers tested the limits of official tolerance, there were limits to
their audacity. Overt reference to current events or real people remained taboo, and
infractions were occasionally (if not always) punished. To trump the "iconography of
absence," woodblock artists resorted to their own "iconography of concealment," using
the same kind of visual hints, puns, and clues deployed in hanjimono and other comical
prints to identify political figures and political events. Since rulers remained faceless,
it was not possible to caricature them-only
kabuki actors could be caricatured.
Instead, when the woodblock artist wanted to mock (or simply comment upon)
members of the political elite, he had to draw other faces-false faces-to represent
them. Historical figures were substituted for contemporary ones-gods,
demons,
birds, beasts, fish, and even vegetables represented human actors-and contemporary
events were restaged in ancient times or as episodes from familiar folk legends.
An 1843 Kuniyoshi print illustrates the elaborate bricolage employed in the
"iconography of concealment" (fig. 5). The print blended two familiar motifs: the tale
of Minamoto Yorimitsu (Raik~),a real medieval warrior leader who had become the
ogre-subduing hero of various popular legends; and the nocturnal parade of monsters,
a theme in scroll paintings and popular prints at least since the sixteenth century.
Kuniyoshi was known for his historical prints of famous warriors, so his choice of
Yorimitsu as a subject for a print was natural. But rumors soon spread that the sleeping
figure of Yorimitsu portrayed the incumbent shogun Ieyoshi and that the guardian
figure to his right with the plaintain crest kimono was Mizuno Tadakuni, his highly
unpopular chief minister, who had launched a draconian reform program aimed
curbing popular extravagance and luxury.' The parade of monsters in the background
was said to represent the turmoil that Mizuno's reforms had created among the people,
especially in Edo and Osaka. The print was so popular that imitators quickly produced
counterfeit versions, and the publisher, fearing official reprisals, voluntarily retrieved
unsold prints and destroyed the blocks (Mi~atake1926,146-47; Minami 1999,11740; Takeuchi 1987, 5-17).
While today we might find prints like the one described above impenetrably
obscure, contemporary readers could unlock their meanings with little difficulty. To
be sure, the message was not always unambiguous, and prints could be read in
alternative ways. Understanding them often required a certain degree of cultural
literacy or inside knowledge of political affairs (Iwashita 1996). On the other hand,
sometimes the message was so obvious that even the illiterate-cultural or otherwise-could grasp it easily. For instance, an 1864 triptych print by Kawanabe Ky6sai
showing battling frog armies appeared as the shogunate was facing a rebellion in the
southwest domain of Chijshii. As a detail of the print shows (fig. 6), the crest of the
2Mizuno was lampooned in cruder broadsheets as a grotesque monster of a kind often on
display in nzisemono (popular sideshows and exhibitions), but only after he was safely out of
office.
Figure 5. Minamoto Yorimitsu kb yakata tsuchigumo y8kai o nasu zu ( A picture of Yorimitsu, the earth spider and monsters), 1843. By
Utagawa Kuniyoshi. Each monster in the background was said to represent a particular reform, from curbs on festival expenses to a ban
on female hairdressers. For example, according to the Fujiokaya diary, the long-necked creature, at top center (rokurokukubz, or "flying
head") represents a ban on story-telling theaters (yose),where tales of the supernatural were often told; and the lantern at top left
inscribed with the character tomi ("wealth" or "fortune") represents a ban on lotteries.
974
PETER DUUS
Figure 6.
Detail from F f l ~ y fkuwazu
l
duigassen (An elegant picture of a
great frog battle), 1864. By Kawanabe Ky6sai.
winning army was a six-leaf hollyhock similar to the Tokugawa crest, a clue that any
contemporary reader would have immediately understood. Whether the print was
intended to predict or support the victory of the shogun's army is not clear.
Nonetheless, even though much of Edo's population had probably already heard the
news, the local authorities reportedly prohibited the sale of the prints and confiscated
the blocks (Oikawa 1992, 69).
As the shogunate's authority faltered in the early 1860s, so did its ability to
suppress news of current events. Censorship was enforced laxly or inconsistently, and
publishers became bolder. The market was flooded with prints commenting on the
inflation of consumer prices, changes in the shogunate's leadership, the assassination
of the Englishman Richardson, the shogun's relations with the imperial court in
Kyoto, and the final clash between the shogunate and loyalist forces. By the fall of
the shogunate in early 1868, the cartoon, or protocartoon, was widely used to disseminate political news and commentary. Like all good cartoons, these satirical prints
condensed, simplified, and clarified the political complexities of the time for their
DEVELOPMENT O F JAPANESE POLITICAL C A R T O O N
975
readers. But just who those readers were remains obscure. Minami Kazuo has argued
that the prints expressed the sentiments of Edo commoners, whose fate was intimately
linked with the fortunes of the shogunate, but there is evidence that suggests the
prints were not popular in the narrow sense since the audience clearly included
members of the samurai elite (Minami 1999, 182-207).
The Cartoon as Political Critique
Determined to dispel the darkness of backward customs, the Meiji leaders
promoted a new political culture appropriate to an "enlightened" age. For the first
time, the government deliberately exposed political authority to the popular gaze.
The new emperor arrived in Tokyo in 1868 in the traditional enclosed palanquin but
he was soon brought out of his palace into the streets and the highways of the country.
Indeed, as Takashi Fujitani has argued, visibility-though not transparency-was at
the heart of the new government's project for political modernization (Fujitani 1996).
Authority was no longer confined to shadowy inner chambers. The Meiji leaders,
modeling their practice on contemporary European monarchies, eagerly consolidated
the new regime's position through ceremonial enhancement. They used visible
symbols of authority-from military parades to a national flag-to bind the population to the new regime and the new national community. The new visibility, however,
was less an instrument of domination than an instrument of persuasion. The emperor
was displayed as a symbol of continuity in a time of radical change, and his ministers
and high officials were named and portrayed in public as his loyal servants.
The sudden unveiling of what once had been officially invisible created new
possibilities for political art. Within a few years of the Restoration commercial print
publishers were quick to exploit these possibilities, cautiously at first with prints that
evoked the transition to direct imperial rule with references to the coronation of the
first emperor, Jimmu, or the progresses of the emperor Nintoku in ancient Japan. But
by the mid-1870s illustrated newspapers (e-iri shinbun) ran pictures that reported on
current events, and printmakers cranked out likenesses of government ministers
debating affairs of the realm (fig. 7). Often the scenes and personages presented were
wholly the product of the artist's imagination, just as fictitious as the foreigners and
treaty port life depicted in the Yokohama prints (Yokohumu-e)of the early 1860s. But
consumers of this new political art probably were less interested in verisimilitude than
in the novelty of seeing how politics really worked on the inside. And if political
actors were displayed with the same flamboyant theatricality as kabuki actors and
courtesans had been, it undoubtedly made them all the more interesting.
It was in this new milieu that the Nipponchi, the first political cartoon magazine
published in Japan, made its appearance (fig. 8). As its name suggests, the magazine
acknowledged Wirgman's Jupun Punch, along with Aesop's Fables and the comical
scrolls of Abbot Toba, as sources of inspiration. Its founders, the versatile print artist
Kawanabe Kyosai and the gesuku (popular fiction) writer Kanagaki Robun, had little
in common with the Westernized elites rising to prominence in the political world.
They were established members of the late Edo artistic demimonde, who had
collaborated in the production of satirical prints-the protocartoons-in the 1850s
and '60s. As the country lurched toward "civilization" while still embracing
traditional customs and habits of mind, these artists found ample opportunities for
social satire. The political world offered rich possibilities too. Visual satire was no
Figure 7. From Ddi Nihon kdn'in kugumi (A view of high officials of
great Japan), 1882. The seated figures in the foreground are Kuroda
Kiyotaka (left) and Yamagata Aritomo (right); the standing figure in the
rear is Matsukata Masayoshi.
longer a concealed weapon but one that could be brandished openly in public. A
mocking pun on the cover of Nipponchi, for example, proudly noted that it was not
"licensed" (kunkyo) but "forbidden" (kankyo) by the government. The content of the
magazine belied its defiant fagade, however, as its founders were careful not to attack
government policy (Duus 1999a).
The political cartoon did not achieve its full potential as a vehicle for the
expression of political opinion (or political critique) until the emergence of an elite
opposition to the government. Relying on public rallies and small-circulation
newspapers, the "freedom and popular rights movement" (jzyfi minken undij), led by
disgruntled former government leaders and officials, mounted an antigovernment
campaign aimed at an audience of the newly Westernized intelligentsia. One of their
main vehicles was the small newspaper. In 1875 the Meiji government responded by
instituting a new press censorship code, which it enforced much more rigorously than
DEVELOPMENT O F JAPANESE POLITICAL C A R T O O N
977
Figure 8. Cover of E-shinbun Nipponchi, June 1874. By Kawanabe KyGsai. Courtesy of Meiji Shinbun Zasshi Bunko, Tokyo University. The figure on the left wielding the artist's brushes is the cartoonist; the figure on the right carrying books is Kanagaki Robun. the shogunate had. Satire, visual and textual, was a way for publishers and editors to
circumvent the code.
In early 1877, Nomura Fumio, a Home Ministry official, resigned from his post
to found the Marumaru chinbun, the most successful and long-lived Meiji humor
magazine. Its name referred to the blank circles (marumaru) that editors inserted in
place of names, phrases, or passages that might have invited prosecution under the
press and libel laws. A fellow student of Fukuzawa Yukichi at Ogata K6an's rangaku
("Dutch Learning") academy in Osaka, Nomura had become an admirer of the British
parliamentary system while studying in England in the late 1860s, and he brought
to his magazine a political passion and a cosmopolitan sensibility that KyGsai and
Robun had lacked. Politically radical but culturally conservative, he hired a writing
staff adept at the wordplay and broad humor of gesaku fiction. His chief cartoonist,
Honda Kinkichir~,trained in Western-style drawing and painting, deployed a visual
vocabulary sprinkled with allusions to traditional folklore and beliefs as well as to the
"new knowledge" from the West. The blending of the two vocabularies was not always
seamless but it reflected the peculiarly hybrid nature of early Meiji culture. For
example, the cover of every issue, proclaiming the magazine's modernity, displayed
three Western-dressed gentlemen intent on seeing all evil, hearing all evil, and sniffing
out all evil for publication, but at the top corners was a more traditional hanjimonolike joke: pictures of a horse (ba) and a deer (ka) punning the word for "fool" or "idiot"
@aka) (fig. 9).
Maramaru chinban was relentless in lampooning the Meiji leaders and their
government, which was still neither popular nor trusted by the population. A favorite
target of its cartoons was the high public official, whom Honda presented as a catfish,
a familiar image from the cartoonlike "catfish pictures" (namaza-e) of the 1850s.
Popular lore blamed the great Edo earthquake of 1855 on the subterranean movements
of a giant catfish who could be subdued only by the Kashima diety, and the catfish
prints showed him as a force that leveled the social hierarchy as it leveled the city. It
was not the catfish's disruptive power but the whiskers it shared with the up-to-date
gentlemen in the government that made it a recognizable symbol for an official.
Catfishlofficials were usually seen in the pages of Maramaru chinban idling away
their time, enjoying themselves at the taxpayers' expense, complaining about their
salaries or defending themselves against the political opposition (fig. 10). Since the
catfish were nameless, poking fun at them was safe, but occasionally Honda resorted
to the "iconography of concealment" to single out particular members of the
government. In an 1879 cartoon four important-looking catfish relaxing at an inn at
Atami were identified by designs on towels hanging from the rack behind them. A
towel with the character for the word "well" (ido) referred to It6 Hirobumi, a rising
younger leader, and the one with three slanting bars (sanjo) stood for Sanj6 Sanetomi,
the government's chief minister. But Honda was not trying to avoid the censor. His
intent was playful, teasing the reader to decipher the clues just as he would in a
hanjimono.
Indeed, the magazine was surprisingly explicit in exposing official corruption,
malfeasance, arrogance, and highhandedness. It displayed an audacity that would have
been unthinkable a decade or so earlier. For example, Honda was pitiless in his attacks
on Kuroda Kiyotaka, a member of the inner circle of leadership, who served as an
army leader and headed the Hokkaid6 Development Bureau. When his wife died in
1878, a small newspaper reported a rumor that Kuroda had stabbed her to death in
a drunken fit. Soon afterward the deceased wife appeared in a Maramarzl chinbzln cartoon
as a rhinoceroslike ghost-the word for "wife" (sai) was a homophone of the word
for "rhinoceros" (sai)-haunting Kuroda in the midst of his tryst with another woman
(fig. 11). Even if no one recognized Kuroda's caricature (really more a likeness than a
caricature), it would have been easy enough to recognize his name and his title spelled
out by the characters on the screen behind him. No attempt was made to disguise
Kuroda's identity as Kuniyoshi had disguised Mizuno Tadakuni's in his 1843 print
(Kimoto 1989, 160-83).
The adversarial style adopted by Maramara chinban cartoonists established the
political cartoon as a weapon in the struggle for public opinion. Positioning itself as
the voice of political outsiders, the magazine clearly sought to shape a public critique
of the regime. Interestingly, however, the censors cracked down on the magazine only
once, at the height of the political crisis of 1881 when a rather crude cartoon by
Honda, probably based on a James Gillray cartoon of Napoleon at bay, showed the
government threatened by several monsters ("economic troubles," "petitioners for a
national assembly," and "loss of public confidence"). But by the mid-1880s the
DEVELOPMENT O F JAPANESE POLITICAL C A R T O O N
Figure 9. Cover of Marumaru chinbun, March 1877. By Honda Kinkichir6. The same cover design appeared on each issue of the magazine. 979
Figure 10. From Maramara chinbun, 7 January 1878. By Honda
Kinkichir~.T he English-language caption reads: "Joy to some and
disappointment to others: drawing lots who is to have his salary raised."
The Japanese caption suggests that catfishlcivil officials received more
than did the grumpy catfishlmilitary officers in the background.
magazine retreated from a strongly partisan political stance into low and sometimes
bawdy humor, and its new main cartoonist, the well-known print artist Kobayashi
Kiyochika, was more comfortable with social satire and comment on foreign relations
than with incisive digs at the nation's leadership (Duus 1999b, 49-50; Kimoto 1999,
249-56).
As the political fevers of the 1870s and 1880s abated, the Meiji leaders and their
minions developed a higher tolerance for public ridicule. Even the censors seem to
have accepted the steady beat of low-key political satire. By the turn of the century
the political cartoon had become a legitimate vehicle for political commentary and
critique. New and more sophisticated humor publications such as Tgky~Puckhad no
compunctions about caricaturing party politicians, ranking bureaucrats, military
leaders, and even the aging Meiji oligarchs themselves. After the Russo-Japanese War
the magazine was bold enough to run cartoons suggesting that the Japanese army,
battening on its victories, was drunk with power and squandering revenues from rising
consumer taxes (fig. 12). Censorship was light. Perhaps the political and bureaucratic
elites had come to understand that although the cartoon might be a weapon, it was
certainly not a deadly one, and that political satire and ridicule could purge political
hostility by venting it.
The only iron taboo the cartoonist faced was the mantle of untouchability draped
around the newly visible but still sanctified imperial person. Even the boldly
iconoclastic Marumaru chinban never displayed the emperor in a cartoon-and only
rarely alluded to his existence. One of the few exceptions was a cartoon commenting
on the arrogance of government leaders who erected handsome new Western-style
Figure 11. From Murumura chinbun, 13 April 1878. By Honda
KinkichirZj. The characters at the top of the folding screen can be read
(from right to left) as: "Kuro{da}, Chief, HokkaidZj Colonization Bureau
(Kurolkuiltukulchdlkun). The blocked lines indicate that the text has been
censored by the authorities.
buildings for themselves while neglecting to rebuild the imperial palace (formerly the
shogunal palace) destroyed by fire in the early 1870s (fig. 13). Court officials and state
bureaucrats strictly controlled how the emperor would be seen. Not even the slightest
hint of parody of the imperial institution was tolerated. In 1889, for example, the
rogue journalist Miyatake Gaikotsu, an avid reader of Murumura chinbun, was tossed
in jail for printing a cartoon parody of the promulgation of the constitution that
depicted an emperorlike figure as a skeleton (Fujitani 1996, 198-9). While it was
legitimate to mock the government and it leaders, it was not legitimate to make fun
of the national patriarch, who embodied the nation-state in his person.
The Modern Cartoon and National Identity
The cartoonist may have wielded his art as a weapon of remonstrance, protest, or
resistance, but in practice he was as often an ally of the state as an agent of "democratic
surveillance." Ultimately the cartoonist belonged to a same political community as
the officials he lampooned-the
newly constituted nation. The political culture
created by the Meiji leadership was predicated on the belief that the only legitimate
and primary claim upon on the political loyalty of the individual was the nation itself,
symbolized in the person of the emperor. This belief was shared by members of the
new literate middle class who made up the reading audience for magazines like
Murumuru chinbun or TFkyo Puck. Even if not supportive of every aspect of government
policy, they were essentially sympathetic to the Meiji nation-building project, and if
the cartoonist violated their sympathy he would have alienated his audience.
982
PETER DUUS
Figure 12. From T ~ k y iPuck,
i
1 June 1906. The Japanese caption
suggests that with the "granting of military rewards" (ronka kTssh6')
amounting to Y150 million the "era of the all-prosperous, all-powerful
military" had arrived.
I
the Tcnno-snmn,
A
t o comrnenoe l o
build i t and not
lot him'stand iti t l ~ n frnisc~.al~le
shed. Eut the secret -is, tllc l~tiilditlrr ~voiilrl cuqt C I I O In n :Infit1 Iut of IIIO~IP?,!vI~ii,ll it i s
i- i j l l i l a $x~oil ciiungll f u r
nlllcll n~orosct~sible
to spclirl oil erccting f i i l~, ; ~ l ; ~ efur
c ~ u~~r;rlvr,r,hircftitl~ft!lsrirrillt-, l'llc &l~e<l
tllc ICtilui.
Figure 13. From Mararnura chinban, 10 August 1878. By Honda Kinkichir~.The English caption reads: "Some people think that after having had so many plans drawn up for a new abode for Tenno-sama, we ought soon to commence to build it, and not let him stand in that miserable shed. But the secret is, the building would cost such an awful lot of money, which it is much more sensible to spend on erecting fine palaces for ourselves, his faithful servants. The shed is quite good enough for the Kami." Interestingly, there is no Japanese caption. It is noteworthy that even before the cartoon was deployed as a weapon of political
criticism, it had already been used to mobilize a sense of national community by
conjuring up visions of external threat. In early 1868, fledgling newspapers such as
Yokohama shimpa moshiogzlsa ran cartoons showing predatory foreigners selling arms to
contending forces in the country or using loans to leverage political control over the
country (fig. 14). Throughout the Meiji period, cartoonists took up the theme of
external threat again and again, whether to point at the economic threat of foreign
merchants forcing up the price of silkworm eggs, the strategic threat of an ominous
Russian octopus stretching its tentacles across Eurasia, or the racial threat of American
bullies intimidating Japanese immigrants on the West Coast. The satirical boundary
the cartoonists drew between "us" and "them" not only marked domestic political
divisions but also traced the contours of national identity.
Naturally, cartoonists sharpened their weapon during times of war, when they
routinely caricatured the enemy as barbarous, bloodthirsty, and cruel-or, alternatively, weak, desperate, and cowardly. During the Sino-Japanese War the Murumura
chinbun mocked the pigtailed armies of the Ch'ing as heroically incompetent, and the
first issue of T&yd Puck, published after the end of the Russo-Japanese War, portrayed
the Russian czar as a timsrous and spindly sumo wrestler ill matched against the
portly figure of General Oyama Iwao, the victorious Japanese commander. During
World War I1 Manga, the main wartime humor magazine, relished caricaturing
Figure 14. From Mochiogasa, 1868. The caption asks how foreign loans
will be repaid, suggesting that foreigners may lay claim to Mt. Fuji to
settle Japan's debts.
President Franklin Roosevelt as a bully or poltroon. In a 1940 cover, drawn before
the Pearl Harbor attack, the American president was a menacing demon in a business
suit, his gnarled hands ready to strangle the Japanese drive to liberate Asia, but by
1944 he had become a forlorn and sickly sailor, the seat of his pants evidently tattered
and torn in retreat (fig. 15).
In subtler but no less important ways, the cartoon also became one of those
ubiquitous everyday mechanisms-like the school textbook, the popular novel, the
exhibition, or the magazine advertisement-that served to naturalize the idea of the
Japanese nation. Already in the late 1870s the cartoon defined a sense of national
uniqueness by dramatizing what made Japan different from other countries. An early
issue of Maramura chinban showed a plucky little Japan pulling ahead of its fat and
clumsy neighbor China in a footrace toward "civilization" (fig. 16). By the turn of
the century, after the government successfully renegotiated the "unequal treaties,"
the celebratory mood was even more marked. An 1899 cartoon by Kitazawa Rakuten,
founder of Tckya Pack, showed an equally plucky but more stylishly dressed little
Japan throwing a reception for the family of "civilized" nations, to which it now
belonged. Needless to say, Japan's victories over China in 1895 and Russia in 1905,
as well as its successes in the war with the United States, unleashed a flood of equally
self-congratulatory cartoons.
The obverse side of celebrating Japan's emergence as a modern "civilized" nation
was disparagement of the conspicuous "backwardness" of its "half-civilized" Asian
neighbors. Throughout the Meiji period, for example, cartoons alternately infantilized,
ridiculed, demonized, or feminized the Koreans, usually depicting them in their native
garb. They were portrayed as either intransigently conservative or as bumblingly
DEVELOPMENT O F JAPANESE POLITICAL C A R T O O N
985
Figure 15. From Mungu, May 1944. By Kond6 Hidez6.
incompetent. When the annexation of Korea finally took place in 1910, Tgkyyd Puck
portrayed the event as a reenactment of an ancient myth-the plunging of the world
into darkness when the sun goddess Amaterasu, upset at her brother's misdeeds,
retreated into a cave. In the cartoon, Governor-General Terauchi Masatake played the
role of the bawdy deity who lured Amaterasu out with a lewd dance, but what he
brought to Korea was not sunshine but "civilization and enlightenment" under
Japanese tutelage (fig. 17). After 1910 Korea and the Koreans more or less disappeared
from cartoons, replaced by China and the Chinese, who provided ample targets for
political and cultural ridicule in Korea's stead.
Interestingly, however, Japanese cartoonists never settled on a stable symbol or
set of signs to represent Japan as a nation. There was no Japanese equivalent of Uncle
Sam, John Bull, or Marianne. Kitazawa Rakuten made an abortive attempt to establish
Amaterasu as a symbol for Japan in the way that a neoclassical goddess like Britannia
represented the British empire, but the image never caught on, perhaps because it
was faintly incongruous to see the imperial ancestress so tangibly embodied in the
flesh (fig. 18). Cartoonists might have presented the emperor himself as a symbol of
the national collective as they had often presented European monarchs as symbols of
their nations, but to do so would have violated the imperial taboo.
Figure 16. From Marumaru chinbun, 21 June 1879. By Honda
Kinkichir~.The caption reads, referring to the Chinese: "With that big
body he cannot walk at all so everyone makes fun of him. Hey, look!
He's walking Chinese-style-higgledy-piggledy (butabuta)." Referring to
the Japanese: "He's little but he is traveling along as light as a
dragonfly. He sure is fast-footed, isn't he?"
Instead, cartoonists resorted to synecdoche, personifying the nation by one of its
members, who somehow or other exemplified the national predicament or situation
of the moment. A cartoon in Nippanchi at the time of the 1874 Taiwan expedition
depicted Japan as a mustachioed gentleman in a Chinese restaurant gobbling food out
of a big rice bowl (taiwan) as a hungry foreigner looked on; the implication was that
Japan had preempted foreign designs on the island (fig. 19). A 1906 T ~ k y dPuck
cartoon commenting on Japan's diplomatic attempts to cultivate cordial ties with the
other major powers after the Russo-Japanese War showed Japan as "Miss Rising Sun"
inviting "Miss Ruse [sic)" to join her and Miss Britannia and Miss France to view the
character for "peace" burning on the hillside during a summer festival in Kyoto. And
in a 1943 issue of Manga magazine Japan is a manly worker doing his bit to strike
back at the enemy by eating unpolished rice as part of the Japanese wartime effort to
achieve national self-sufficiency (fig. 20). This brief catalogue seems to confound any
schema that associates cartoon representations of national identity with representations
of gender, class, or even body type in any obvious or simple way.
The more interesting point, however, is that the portrayal of the national
community as a kind of "Everyman" (or "Everywoman") may well have facilitated the
audience's sense of identity with the nation in a way that a standard icon like Uncle
Sam does not. The good uncle represents what we stand for but not who we are; for
he always wears the same funny suit and sports the same beard whether he is opening
the door to China, making the world safe for democracy, or leading the fight against
Hitler and Mussolini. The Japanese cartoonist may have discovered a supple way of
DEVELOPMENT O F JAPANESE POLITICAL C A R T O O N
Figure 17. Cover of Tgkyb Puck, 1 September 1910.
987 988
PETER DUUS
Figure 18. From Rakuten zensh~,vol. 5. By Kitazawa Rakuten. The
cartoon celebrates the signing of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1902.
The treaty was intended to deter Russia from advancing into Korea, and
the two goddesses, Amaterasu and Britannia, look benevolently down
through the clouds at the Korean peninsula below.
Figure 19. From Nipponchi, June 1874. Kawanabe Ky6sai (cartoon);
Kanagaki Robun (text). Courtesy Meiji Shinbun Zasshi Bunko, Tokyo
University. The Japanese man on the right says he cannot eat as much as
he would like, since there is not much rice in the bowl (taiwan); the
Chinese man on the left says that he will be upset if all the rice is eaten;
and the Westerner looking down on both offers to eat any leftovers.
defining shifts in the sense of national identity by changing the national symbol as
changing circumstances dictated. The early Meiji reader of Nipponchi, for instance,
may have found a little bit of himself in the mustachioed gentleman, and the home
front worker in 1943 would certainly have seen himself in the Manga cartoon. It was
easier for the reader to identify with a specific rendering of the nation self than a
generic one.
The Ambiguity of the Modern Political Cartoon
In sum, while the cartoonist helped to maintain a "democratic surveillance" on
the government, he also contributed to the construction of a national imaginary whose
legitimacy and authority was never questioned. In the first instance the cartoonist
appealed to a "civil public" suspicious of the pretensions of the bureaucratic state; in
the second instance he catered to a "national public" deeply committed to defending
the nation-state and its claims. The nesting of the state in the nation meant that the
function of the cartoon as a political weapon was ambiguous, a weapon both of the
weak and the strong, as easily deployed in defense of the state as in an attack upon
it.
Figure 20. From Manga 11 (1943). By Kond6 Hidez6. The cartoon, intended to promote a campaign to increase economic self-sufficiency in food production, urges readers to strengthen themselves by eating unpolished rice. Nothing illustrates this ambiguity better than two contrasting self-representations
of the cartoonist. The first, drawn by Kat6 Etsur6 for the 1940 "New Order Issue"
of Manga, is entitled "The Cartoonist's Mission." It appeared at the time of the
establishment of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, a reorganization of the
polity into a quasi-totalitarian structure in preparation for a widening war (fig. 21).
The cartoonist is shown wielding a three-pronged pen to spear domestic enemies of
the newly mobilized state: obsessive consumers, black market merchants, Westernophiles,
decadents, hedonists, hoarders, dogmatists, nihilists, and conservative supporters of
the status quo. It implies that the function of the cartoonist is to defend the state
against the unpatriotic and the unproductive-the
"antipeople" (hikokumin) who
criticize or weaken the state.
Figure 21.
"The Cartoonist's Mission," from Mungu 8 (October 1940). By Kat6 Etsur6. In a manifesto accompanying the cartoon, Kond6 Hidez6, one of the magazine's
founders, unconditionally identified the cartoonist with the state-and the state with
the nation:
Do not a million hearts beat as one? The people uinmin) rely on the government,
and the government loves the people. Cartoonists who think that it is progressive
only to defy the government are a callow lot. . . . The government and the people
[kokzlmin) sup from the same pot as they always have, and they have no choice but
to advance in step with one another.
(Manga 8 , no. 9 [October 19401: 3)
Indeed, a cartoon in the same issue shows this happy marriage of the people and state
as a parade of ordinary folk, cheerily following Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro under
the banner of "totalitarianism" (zentuishugi) (fig. 22). It would be hard to find a more
apt example of a cartoon deployed to strengthen the bureaucratic state.
How very different was the stance taken in the first issue of Murumuru chinbun,
whose opening page expressed delight that "thanks to the arrival of civilization" it
Figure 22. From Manga 8 (October 1940). By Ishikawa Shinsuke. The
caption reads: "Don't be distracted by exceptions." It may refer to the
attempt of the affluent-looking man-a selfish capitalist?to break into the line.
was no longer necessary to suppress the urge to talk nonsense in a comical way and
that the "bright light of a new day" had liberated "wit" (kokkei) and "satire" (gigen)
from the political restraints imposed under the Tokugawa shogunate (Marumara
chinban 1, no. 1 [March 14, 18771: 2). In a cartoon on the same page, the magazine's
editor (or perhaps its cartoonist) stands on a public platform, arousing a crowd or rally
(which includes women as well as men) with passionate oratory, very much as the
government's opposition did (fig. 23). The image is that of the public advocate
speaking truth to the people, not sedating them with appeals to political unity and
harmony.
Even more striking is the contrast between Kond6's manifesto in Manga and an
anonymous editorial probably written by Nomura Fumio, the magazine's founder, in
an early issue of Marunzara chinban:
DEVELOPMENT O F JAPANESE POLITICAL C A R T O O N
Figure 23.
993
From Marzlmarzl chinbun, 14 March 1877 By Honda Kinkichir6. The interests of the government and the interests of the people are entirely different.
What the first celebrates as beneficial to itself, the other deplores harmful-and vice
versa. Ordinary people find republican government and constitutional government
most desirable, but the government despises both. By contrast, the government
prefers a monarchical system or the despotism of a single sovereign, but the people
like neither.
(Marurnaru chinbun no. 18 Uuly 21, 18771: 2)
It was precisely this adversarial relationship between the government and the people
that the magazine celebrated again and again, both in text and in cartoons. Indeed,
the spirit of the editorial was captured in a Honda cartoon showing the catfishlofficials
of the Meiji state hurriedly erecting a fence to keep the "dogs of the people" (minken)a play on the word for "popular rightsM-from breaching the inner circle of power
(fig. 24).
It is tempting to read these contrasting manifestoes, and these contrasting selfrepresentations, as a narrative of the development (or perhaps devolution) of the
Japanese political cartoon from dissent to collaboration. Or to put it another way, the
contrast suggests that as the Japanese state grew more powerful it was able to co-opt
the cartoonist and subvert his function of providing "democratic surveillance." But
that narrative is misleading. It would be more accurate to see the contrast as a
reflection of the ambiguities inherent in the position of the modern political
cartoonist, who serves an audience, simultaneously patriotic and alienated, that is
caught up in the contradictory impulses implicit in the political culture of the nationstate.
994
PETER DUUS
Figure 24. From M a ~ u m a mchinban, 3 April 1880. By Honda Kinkichiro. The English caption reads: "Theg [sic) may use any efforts to keep those fierce brutes out: they will get through some day." Shortly before the publication of the cartoon, the Kokkai kisei dcmeikui (The League to Establish a National Assembly) had been organized in Osaka to begin a national petition campaign for a constitution and a parliament, and in response the government issued new regulations requiring prior police approval for political associations and political rallies. In Japan as elsewhere, the founders of modern nation-states sought to find an
appropriate balance between coercion and consent in governing. The modern nationstate emancipated the national public but disciplined it; it promoted popular political
participation but limited its boundaries; it tolerated political criticism but encouraged
political conformity. The all-important equilibrium among these contradictory impulsesemancipation vs. discipline, criticism vs. conformity, exclusion vs. inclusion-constantly shifted, and it is not surprising to find that the cartoonist was pulled now in
one direction, now in another as the public mood changed. The cartoonist might like
to think of himself as a rainmaker, summoning up storms of public protest or public
patriotism, but he was just as often a weather vane, whose turnings did not create
changes in the climate of opinion but merely recorded them.
Conclusion
Let me return to my point that we ought to take political cartoons seriously.
Until recently scholars have underestimated their value for obvious reasons. Art
historians have ignored cartoons because their visual language is so simple, their
DEVELOPMENT OF JAPANESE POLITICAL CARTOON
995
meanings too obvious or obscure, and their mode of production too mechanical. How
could an art form so everyday and commonplace be of any aesthetic value? Historians,
on the other hand, have often used cartoons as illustrations but have rarely taken them
seriously as texts. Why look at cartoons for evidence when shelf miles of documents
remain unread in the archives? But it is precisely the commonplace qualities that
tempt us to trivialize the cartoon-the simplicity of its language, the directness of
its message, and the mechanical character of its production-that
make it of such
value to students of history, culture, and society. Like old photographs or newsreels,
cartoons reveal a side of political culture not found in official memoranda, public
speeches and newspaper editorials, theoretical tracts, and ideological pamphlets. They
provide access to "everyday" reactions to politics that even public opinion polls cannot
capture. Cartoons thus constitute a vast archive that reveals not only fundamental
shifts in political consciousness but also the ebb and flow of political sentiments among
the thousands and millions who read them-sentiments left unvoiced by the silence
of other texts and other archives.
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