Manga

Guest post by Mitchell Clark

As a former student assistant working with the library’s manga collection, I recently had the opportunity to translate Nonkina Tōsan Shusse Sugoroku, a gameboard featuring a popular cartoon character known as Carefree Daddy. My translation was part of a broader project supporting K–12 educator workshops centered on the library’s historical sugoroku collection. In addition to introducing teachers to the history of these games and their place within Japanese popular culture, the workshop aimed to provide classroom-ready materials that could allow students to directly engage with and even play the games themselves.

出世 – shusse: success in life; getting ahead; successful career; promotion; climbing the corporate ladder; eminence 

Translating the rules of this gameboard also posed an interesting challenge, as the written language of the early 20th century differs  from written Japanese today. Enthusiasts of the Japanese language will find this 1925 sugoroku extremely interesting as a valuable codex showcasing archaic hiragana, katakana, kanji, and other early 20th century linguistic phenomena. One of my favorite examples seen throughout is the placement of extra consonants in front of single-vowel sounds and the outright swapping of other characters. Here, we see that:

• お (o) is sometimes realized as ほ (ho) 

• え (e) is sometimes realized as  へ (he) 

• い (i) is sometimes realized as ゐ (wi) 

• ず (zu) is sometimes realized as づ (dzu) 

• わ (wa) is sometimes realized as は (ha)

Some other idiosyncrasies of this archaic written language I found were:

• 言う – iu “to say” is realized as 云ふ (ifu) 

• 一回 – ikkai “once” is realized as 一囘 

• 居る and ゐる are both used, meaning いる 

• ゝ appears as a hiragana repetition mark (いゝ – ii “good”), similar to 々. 

• When attached to an adjective, sono is written in hiragana. However, when compounded with kanji, sono is realized as 其（i.e., その云はない人 vs 其人） 

• The small tsu (ッ and っ), also known as sokuon, is less common, and the full size tsu is sometimes used to denote double consonants instead. 

The playing board is written in katakana except for a few instructional notes written in hiragana,  a distinction that made me wonder if this was a stylistic choice or a standard of the time. Writing in katakana might have provided more accessibility for those who were not fully literate in the Japanese written language, a complex system that had not been standardized since the late 19th century. The artist behind this cartoon, Asō Yutaka, was from Oita, a prefecture that even now is known for its distance from the capital of Tokyo. Perhaps his humble beginning in rural Japan is what inspired his signature use of katakana.

Asō was not only a talented illustrator but he also showed skill and creativity with lettering, including his use of font, and typography. He also opted to write some characters in bold letters and left spaces in between certain words (atypical in written Japanese), helping readers to “break up” longer sentences in the absence of kanji.

Interestingly, having good reading skills and being able to read these spaces properly would have likely given players an advantage in the game, as one of its finer rules required players to recite speech-bubble quotes within the game in order to advance. For example, as in the inset in the image above, Rule Three says “If you can repeat the words of “Cherry blossom viewing” several times without stuttering, making mistakes, or pausing, you can move forward one space per number of times repeated. But if you fail in the middle of the second attempt, or if you make a mistake on the third attempt, you’ll be forced to go back in the opposite direction.” (A close-up image of this rule is also available below).