Masters of Manga

• Title: トキワ荘パワー！ – Tokiwa-sō Power!
• Edited by: Hideko Mizuno & Akira Maruyama
• Featured authors: Osamu Tezuka, Fujio Akatsuka, Shōtarō Ishinomori, Jirō Tsunoda, Fujiko F. Fujio, Hideko Mizuno, Tokuo Yokota, Asuka Izumi, U. MIA
• Publishing house: Shōdensha
• Magazine: Shōjo Club, Nakayoshi and others
• Publishing year: 2010
• Classification: Classic shōjo manga, report
• Volumes: 1

In Japan, there are quite a few books and studies about the legendary Tokiwa-sō, that apartments building where many epoch-making mangaka, starting from Osamu Tezuka, lived and work in the 1950s. There are specific books and documents about the matter, biographies of the several authors that lived there and even a book, Tokiwa-sō Jitsuroku (Playback Tokiwa-sō), that features manga autobiographical short stories with episodes, memories and thoughts of the mangaka, written by the mangaka themselves, that were published in Tezuka’s COM magazine in the early 1970s.

I’ve had a special interest on Tokiwa-sō for quite a long time now and I’ve been writing about it quite extensively in my blog MangaLand (Spanish only). I’ve even given a conference on the matter, earlier this year at Complutense University of Madrid, so I’ve been to the place where Tokiwa-sō was, I’ve eaten ramen at Matsuya’s and I’ve participated in a couple of stamp rallies there, and I’ve read books on the subject, both general books about Tokiwa-sō and biographical works by some of the artists who lived there, such as Shōtarō Ishinomori. One of the objectives of Masters of Manga was to get to interview all living members of Tokiwa-sō, both “inhabitants” (people who actually lived there) and “visitors” (mangaka who did not live there but who visited frequently). So far, I’ve talked to “inhabitants” Shinichi Suzuki, Hideko Mizuno and Tokuo Yokota, and “visitors” Jirō Tsunoda, Kunio Nagatani and editor Akira Maruyama. The only one living Tokiwa-sō related person I’ve still to interview is Fujiko Fujio A. Let’s hope I can do this interview in the near future.

Anyway, you can see there is a little obsession going on here. Tokiwa-sō was a two storied wooden building with some 20 very little rooms, with common kitchen and toilets, but no bath – a very typical, average Japanese lodging of that time, for that matter. In 1953, Osamu Tezuka moved there from his home in Takarazuka –near Osaka– as he needed a base in Tokyo. He had been very successful publishing direct-to-book stories in the Osaka book industry, but the manga market was rapidly shifting to the big publishers in Tokyo, who wanted manga stories for their children magazines. An editor at Gakudōsha, the publisher of Manga Shōnen magazine –for which Tezuka was writing Jungle Taitei (The Jungle Emperor / Kimba the White Lion) recommended him newly built Tokiwa-sō, and there he moved. Tezuka and Gakudōsha acted as a magnet for other aspiring manga writers who came to Tokyo from all over Japan, even after Tezuka moved out in October of 1954. Among these mangaka, we can find “King of Manga” Shōtarō Ishinomori, Doraemon and Manga Michi authors Fujiko Fujio (a creative duo that would split in 1987 as Fujiko F. Fujio and Fujiko Fujio A), humor manga powerhouse Fujio Akatsuka, occultism and paranormal manga specialist Jirō Tsunoda, shōjo manga icon Hideko Mizuko and anime pioneer Shinichi Suzuki, among others. It is really fascinating that so many influential mangaka lived in the same place, and that so little of it is known in the West.

Anyway, as I was saying, I’ve read many books and documents about Tokiwa-sō, but there was never a book in which you could find actual manga written by these authors while they were living there –at most, you can find little drawings and panels, but not whole stories. Sure, I’ve read Manga Michi –a semi-autobiographical manga story by Fujiko Fujio A that features many of the manga both Fujiko Fujios wrote since their debut until the later 1950s– Tezuka’s Jungle Taitei and Ribon no Kishi (Princess Knight), that were written there, and… Not really many more stuff, as most of these works were published in the magazines of the time and were never published as a separate book.

Hideko Mizuno and Akira Maruyama wanted to fix this, so they planned a book that would feature actual stories by some of the Tokiwa-sō mangaka, written while they were living in the “manga apartments”. Besides, as we already know, there is very little information about early, pre-Year 24 Group, shōjo manga. Actually, the first shōjo manga were written almost entirely by men, as there were almost any women mangaka, and the Tokiwa-sō members were not an exception. Mizuno and Maruyama’s ultimate aim, as I understood from my interviews with them, is to show that there was good shōjo manga before the Year 24 Group, so this book compiles several shōjo stories written by the Tokiwa-sō mangaka.

This is an incredible document for those of us interested on early manga in general and early shōjo manga in particular. Here, we can read stories by Tezuka (the start of Princess Knight and another short story), Fujio Akatsuka, Shōtarō Ishinomori, Jirō Tsunoda, Fujiko F. Fujio, Hideko Mizuno and Tokuo Yokota, all of them very interesting. We have adventures, romance, humor, drama… Everything. So this proves the point stated by Mizuno and Maruyama: often it is said that the pre-Year 24 Group shōjo manga was really bland, tear-jerking and simple, but this is not at all true.

This book is also really interesting because it features two stories by Asuka Izumi and U. MIA. This might not ring a bell to you, but for Tokiwa-sō nerds like me, this is hugely interesting, as Asuka Izumi was the pen name used by Fujio Akatsuka and Shōtarō Ishinomori, under which they created a few stories, and U. MIA was the collective name of Hideko Mizuno, Shōtarō Ishinomori and Fujio Akatsuka. The stories created collectively by these huge manga masters had never been available after they were published in Shōjo Club magazine in the late 1950s and, after reading so much about Asuka Izumi and U. MIA and seeing little panels and illustrations, I was really curious about it. This has been like a dream come true.

The book ends with a very interesting talk between an interviewer, Mizuno, Maruyama and Yokota that gives very interesting information about what Tokiwa-sō was, how was life there and what was early shōjo manga like. There are also some other interesting pieces of information that make this a quite complete book, absolutely a must have for every Tokiwa-sō buff out there.

Strong points

• This is the first time that actual manga by several authors drawn in Tokiwa-sō is made available in one book.
• This is the first time that manga stories by Asuka Izumi and U. MIA are published since the 1950s.
• The text extras are quite interesting and some good information can be extracted from them. For example, we can learn that the first mangaka ever to use screentone in manga was Takemaru Nagata, one of the “visitors” of Tokiwa-sō.

Weak points

• I would have loved to read stories by other Tokiwa-sō members like Hiroo Terada, Naoya Moriyasu or Shinichi Suzuki, among others, but for some reason there were not any of them in this book. This might be because either they never wrote shōjo stories (which is not true at least for Moriyasu) or because they or their heirs would not give permission.
• I miss some other text information, for example: Why were these stories selected and not others? What other main stories were there written in Tokiwa-sō? and so on.
• It is very, very improbable to ever see this book published in any Western language.