A Quick Peek at the World: Manga Sugoroku Board Game. 世界早のぞき. 漫画双六

[Nagoya], Shin-Aichi, 昭和6年 [1931]. Drawn by Tsutsumi Kanzō (堤寒三). New Year supplement to Shin-Aichi no. 14129 (新愛知新年附錄).
55x79 cm

A children’s New Year game with a grown-up view of the world, seen from Japan on the eve of its militarist turn.

A colourful New Year sugoroku (双六) issued as a supplement to the Nagoya daily Shin-Aichi. It is a “jumping” (tobi) sugoroku: the throw of the die decides which square the player flies to next, and the playing pieces are aeroplanes, to be cut out from the margin. The flight starts at Nagoya Castle, the newspaper’s home city, and ends on the summit of Mount Fuji.

The twenty squares take young Japanese aviators on a whirlwind world tour, and most of them allude to the news of 1929–1930: Mussolini in Italy; Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Chinese Nationalist government, amid the Chinese civil war; Ramsay MacDonald, host of the London Naval Conference of 1930, bowing to serve tea to Japanese children; Charlie Chaplin in Hollywood; the Austrian ski pioneer Hannes Schneider, whose celebrated visit to Japan in 1930, at the invitation of Prince Chichibu, did much to popularise skiing there; Hugo Eckener with the Graf Zeppelin, which stopped in Japan in 1929 on the first round-the-world flight by airship; and the French tennis champion Henri Cochet. Other squares show the South Seas (reflecting Japan’s mandate over Micronesia), Japanese settlers landing in Brazil (emigration to Brazil was then at its height), a pagoda in Manchuria (the game was published eight months before the Manchurian Incident), baseball in New York, bullfighting in Spain, the Himalayas, the African desert and penguins in Antarctica.

Tsutsumi Kanzō (堤寒三, 1895–1972), a former film assistant director, was drawing topical cartoons for the youth magazine Shinseinen (新青年) as early as 1920 and went on to work as a newspaper cartoonist for the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun (東京日日新聞), Yomiuri Shimbun (読売新聞) and Asahi Shimbun (朝日新聞), specialising in topical, sports and parliamentary cartoons — which shows in this densely news-driven game.

Сondition

Colours bright. The aeroplane playing pieces in the right margin are present and uncut. Good: folded as issued, paper evenly toned, light rubbing and soiling, a few short tears and small chips to edges, small repair to upper edge.

Rarity

Copies are held by Duke University Libraries and Princeton University Library (Cotsen Children’s Library).