Open Collections

Guo, Xiangying (Alisa)

University of British Columbia

This thesis explores the use of black and white space on the manga page to portray characters associated with differential amounts of "blackness/darkness" and " whiteness/lightness" and how manga artists thereby relayed messages about social status, desirability, and Japan’s place within international hierarchies configured by race, ethnicity, and gender in the 1970s. Blackness and whiteness on the manga page were sometimes intended to correlate with perceived racial categories as understood by manga artists at that time, but because manga iconography often lacks explicit differentiation between individuals of different races or nationalities, in many cases that correlation was ambiguous or absent. Nonetheless, relative whiteness/lightness or blackness/darkness still relayed messages about relative merit in fictional situations that referenced postwar social issues in Japan: the Women’s Liberation movement and the concern over the renewal of the United States-Japan Security Treaty. The analysis centers on Ikeda Riyoko’s shōjo manga The Rose of Versailles and Tezuka Osamu’s shōnen manga "Black Jack," both from the 1970s. While the analysis of the former does not primarily address racial issues, it reveals that in shōjo manga, the "White" world of fantasy can represent a liberating realm for female readers. In contrast, shōnen manga uses "Whiteness" and "Blackness" to symbolize strength and weakness in a more realistic context, where race, ethnicity, and nationality are explicitly depicted on the manga page. The thesis further examines how these two manga were adapted for the all-women Takarazuka theatre, analyzing depictions of whiteness/lightness and blackness/darkness as portrayed by bodies that are themselves already gendered and racialized.

Text; Still Image

2024-03-07

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/87540

Asian Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/