NotCliche

You don’t really need to read it yourself if it’s kamishibai!

The evolution of anime and manga has indeed come a long way since the start of it’s time, but do you know that the origins of both anime and manga had shared a whole load of similarity the mangas we see today?

Kamishibai is a thing of the past and you would probably not find anything of such sorts in modern Japan these days. Meaning as “street theater using painted illustrations”, these kamishibai activity was a popular activity for many children back in the olden days of Japan. Using only a couple of paintings and a miniature stage called a butai, a storyteller would read the story from the back of the painting to the many children in front of him.

One of the kamishibai’s stories.

Each kamishibai session is called show and each show usually contains 3 stories which lasts a total of 10 minutes each. The stories usually follows a set genre:  an adventure for boys, a domestic drama for girls and then a simple comic story. More often than not, each “episode” would end in a cliffhanger and thus forcing eager children to return to the sessions if they want to know the ending of the story.

There had been research on such topics too. Nash, a New York Times writer and research editor, had recently went to Japan in search of this origin of manga called kamishibai and he had found several similarities that kamishibai has in common with the modern anime and manga.

Majority of the recurring stories that were frequently told in kamishibai are usually giant robots and monsters from outer space and some of the characters feature in kamishibai usually sport huge saucer-like eyes, which is a mean to convey the emotions of a character to the audience.

A traditional kamishibai storyteller narrating the story to the audience.

However, kamishibai didn’t last very long when the world is rapidly moving towards the future. The demise of kamishibai came at about 1958 with the introduction of television in Japan, and this had decreased the popularity of kamishibai as television programs became more frequent, and people would not need to leave their house just to listen to a story.

Since the demise of kamishibai, many of the previous authors and artistes of kamishibai started moving towards the modern manga and anime as we know of it today. This might explain how similar kamishibai is to the manga of the 50s to 60s as that’s probably when manga came into view.

The earliest form of manga could somewhat been attributed to this person called Katsushika Hokusai as many people would believe, but there are also talks that kamishibai is the true origin of manga and anime as kamishibai has existed since the start of the 12th century. However, regardless of what might be the truth, there’s no doubt that kamishibai had played an important role in the rise and evolution of manga and anime of the modern day.

Even though television has largely replaced kamishibai since it’s introduction, this does not mean that kamishibai is lost forever. There are still several kamishibai storytellers going around Japan these days and they usually appear at some expo or another. Since they are considered as “travelling storytellers” in some sense, you might just bump into one of them someday in Japan!

Via: LA Times.

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