The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum Blog: Found in the Collection: Jiji Manga, February 1921

The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum’s blog highlights the first issue of Jiji Manga (see above):

I’ve been purchasing Jiji Manga issues for the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum collection from used book stores in Japan over several years, so our holdings are nearly complete.

Scholars are beginning to use this source for research. For example, Gennifer Weisenfeld researched images in Ohio State’s copy of Jiji Manga for her new book, Imaging Disaster:Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923.  (NX584.A1 W45 2012 )

Over several years — and with the help of my very talented graduate assistant, Hyejeong Choi, we’ve been indexing the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum’s holdings of Jiji Manga in the library’s wiki to facilitate access. Hyejeong made thumbnails of each issue’s cover page and transcribed the Japanese text.  In some cases we’ve also added translations and links to related resources when we had time.

Here’s a link to the wiki page for the first issue: Jiji Manga No. 1 (shown above) by cartoonist, Rakuten KITAZAWA.

At that early time, use of the word “manga” was very fluid and included various kinds of images such as photographs. Over the course of the next few years, gradually photographs drop out of the pages of this newspaper comic.  The BICL&M blog page shows the photographs on interior pages of this issue.

For information about other issues, browse the wiki from the main page for Jiji Manga. Our work on this wiki index is still incomplete.  Hopefully we will find more  time to work on it soon!