[Comics of the World: After Japan] 世界の漫画 あぷれ・にっぽん

Tokyo: アソカ書房, [1954]. Edited by Suyama Keiichi (須山計一).
8vo. 196, [1] pp., ill.

Japan’s war and occupation as the world’s cartoonists drew it.

Posters, caricatures and comic strips clipped from magazines and newspapers and arranged to track Japan from the 1930s through the invasion of the mainland, the war, the American occupation, Korea, the Treaty of San Francisco and the Mutual Security Agreement. Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek, Roosevelt, Mussolini, Stalin, Truman, Ridgway and MacArthur all take their turn.

The contributors are drawn from everywhere at once: David Low; Rollin Kirby, Fred Ellis and Ed Doughty; Picasso and Jean Effel; George Grosz; the Kukryniksy, Boris Efimov and Yuliy Ganf; Mi Gu, Li Binghong and Hua Junwu; Sugiura Yukio, Kitaoka Fumio, Yokoyama Taizō and Ogiwara Kenji.

Suyama Keiichi (1905–1975) — manga artist, Western-style painter, critic and activist — closes with an afterword on his own war and postwar years: the death of Yanase Masamu, the foreigners who stayed in Japan through the war, the shifting public attitude to the emperor, thermonuclear testing, and a list of exactly which magazines and newspapers each image came from.

Binding & condition

Original pictorial wrappers with the cover after Boris Efimov’s American Freedom, in the printed slipcase. Good: light wear to the wrappers, small tears to the spine, small losses to the slipcase edges, bookseller’s ticket to the slipcase verso.

Rarity

OCLC locates four copies outside Japan.