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Shimizu
Isao, 2015 Japan Cultural Affairs Agency Award winner
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by Ronald Stewart
Shimizu
Isao, a giant in manga studies scholarship (and founding International Editorial
Board member for IJOCA) left us on March 2, 2021 at age 81, after a battle with
prostate cancer. Shimizu was astonishingly prolific. Over a period of roughly
fifty-years from when he began to publish on manga history, he penned and/or edited in excess of 100 books, but this was just part of his legacy.
Born
in Tokyo in 1939, Shimizu had toyed with the idea of becoming a cartoonist or
animator after graduating university, but found himself instead doing editing
work between 1963 and 1984 for publishers in the heart of Tokyo’s Jimbochō secondhand
book district. His growing interest in satirical prints and cartoons,
particularly those of the Edo (1600-1868) and Meiji (1868-1912) periods, as
well as comics history in general, led to him haunt those used bookstores. He managed
to amass a huge collection of historical comic art cheaply, at a time when
there was very little interest in this material. His home overflowing with a collection
that swelled to over two million items (magazines, clippings, books and prints)
and became the Japanese Manga Archives (Nihon Manga Shiryō-kan). This
collection not only enabled Shimizu to research, exhibit and publish using this
material, but he also allowed other historians, museums and students access for
their research.
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| The caricature used on his name cards and website | | | | | |
Public
institutions had long ignored this kind of material as ephemera of little value.
However, as Shimizu’s writing, talks and exhibitions began to draw attention to
pre-war manga history, his collection and his expertise became sought after by
more and more museums, galleries, libraries, universities, and the media, and became
integral to a number of major exhibitions in Japan. These include, his early “Meiji
Manga” exhibition at Machida City Museum in 1978, “300 Years of Japanese Manga”
at Kawasaki City Museum in 1996, “Images of Meiji – The World of French Artist
George Bigot in Japan” at Itami City Art Museum in 2002, and the “Grand Manga
History: Tracing back to Edo” at Kyoto International Manga Museum in 2015. At
the time of his death, the large “Giga – Manga” exhibition that he supervised –
consisting of comic art from Edo satirical prints, called giga, to early
popular comics of the 1930s - is touring a number of public and private museums
throughout the country. He had also been involved in exhibitions and manga
related events in France, Germany, Spain and Italy.  |
| Giga Manga exhibition catalogue 2020-2021 |
After Shimizu quit his editing work
around 1984 to concentrate full time on researching and writing on satirical
cartoons and manga history, he was employed as a research associate at Kawasaki
City Museum for nearly two decades. In 2006, he became an advisor to the Kyoto
International Manga which acquired a large portion of his collection. The
“Shimizu Collection” there forms the core of the museum’s pre-war historical
holdings. At both of these institutions, Shimizu helped foster a number of
young curators and researchers active at various institutions today. At Teikyo
Heisei University, where Shimizu worked as a professor for over a decade, more
than a few students had an interest in satirical cartoons and manga history kindled
by his lectures.
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| 1995 Poster for a public lecture |
Shimizu was also involved with the creation
in 2001 of the Japan Society for the Study of Cartoons and Comics (Nihon
Manga Gakkai) and was a member of its inaugural board of directors. This
remains the only national society for this field of study in Japan. However, Shimizu
no doubt felt slightly marginalized, for the vast majority of the society’s more
than 350 members are interested first and foremost in post-war and modern narrative
comics expression (rather than Shimizu’s first love of satirical cartoons and pre-war
comics history). Moreover, for the limited number of younger scholars who now
actively research early manga history, Shimizu’s long view perspective on this
history - a perspective built upon earlier manga histories which connects comics
to a centuries-old humorous art tradition - had become the subject of
criticism. Nevertheless, while Shimizu’s books are primarily aimed at a general
audience, many of them are, and will remain for many years to come, essential reading
for any scholar of manga. In Yoshimura Kazuma and Jaqueline Berndt’s 2020 book Manga
Studies, which introduces thirty foundational books in the field to
Japanese readers, Shimizu’s 1991 classic Manga History (Manga no
Rekishi), is at the top of the list as a “first step into Japanese manga history
research.”
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Bigot Sketch Collection 1 - Manners and Customs of Meiji
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Shimizu’s earliest books were two self-published
cartoon collections in the early 1970s. The first grew out of his fascination
with French artist Georges Ferdinand Bigot who produced satirical cartoon
magazines while living in Japan at the end of the nineteenth-century. The other
book was a rare collection of wartime political cartoons. These two interests, Georges
Bigot and wartime cartoons, along with Edo period humorous prints, Meiji period
satirical magazine cartoons and cartoonists, manga pioneer Okamoto Ippei, early
postwar comics, and newspaper comic strips, were themes he would revisit throughout
his career, revealing surprising new discoveries each time. Shimizu wrote or
edited eighteen
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Manga Shonen and Akahon Manga
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publications on Bigot, many of which have been reprinted
multiple times; his 1992 book Bigot’s Japanese Sketch Collection (Bigōt
Nihon sobyō-shū) has gone through an incredible thirty-one printings. Among
his other publications that are highly regarded are his 1989 book on the early
postwar magazine ‘Manga Shōnen’ and akahon manga books, his 1997
book on Hasegawa Machiko’s Sasae-san comic strip, and his 2008 book on
the pioneering story manga artist Yokoi Fukujirō. For scholars of manga
history, his chronologies of manga publications, manga dictionary, and his
reprints early satirical magazines, in particular his 1986 series Manga Magazine
Museum (Manga zasshi hakubutsukan), are indispensable references.
His self-published journal Satirical Cartoon Research (Fūshi-ga
kenkyū), 48 issues between 1992 to 2005, is an important resource for
scholars of political cartoons.
Shimizu’s efforts to preserve,
record and bring manga’s early history to a broad audience earned him the 1986
“Special Jury Award” from the Japanese Cartoonists Association and in 2015 a “Special
Achievement Award” from the Japan Agency for Cultural Affairs. It is no
exaggeration to say Shimizu’s achievement in making material available through
his collection, exhibitions and publications has made it possible for a new
generation to conduct pre-war manga history research today.
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Pages from Fushiga Kenkyu journal showing research on Shonen Puck
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My own research on early manga
history was sparked by Shimizu’s publications on Meiji satirical cartoons, written
in highly readable jargon-free prose. I had the good fortune to meet him a
number of times over the years beginning in 1995 when I attended one of his
public lectures. He acted as chair in 2002 for my first academic paper in
Japanese on Frank A Nankivell and his student, Japan’s first career mangaka
Kitazawa Rakuten (for more details, see Fusami Ogi’s interview with Shimizu in IJOCA
5(2) 2003). The last time we met was at another talk public talk in 2018 on
Rakuten. As always, I was amazed by his encyclopedic knowledge of not just
Japanese, but also foreign cartoon history (He could be described in Japanese
as an ikijibiki or a ‘living dictionary’). His curiosity was also insatiable,
and his eyes would sparkle whenever he a conversation turned to manga and
cartoon history research. While my own take on the history of manga development
has come to diverge from his over the years, his work continues to be important
for me. On the bookshelves of my study, I keep over fifty of his books close at
hand as a constant source of information and inspiration. I, like many others, felt
his ever-inquisitive mind would continue to provide us with more research,
discoveries and exhibitions. Rest in peace Shimizu-sensei, and thank you.
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| Some of Shimizu Isao's many books on my bookshelves |
A version of this will appear in print in IJOCA 23-1.
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