Breaking In

MATT THORN: So you said you were drawn to the way Tezuka portrayed his characters' psychology?

MOTO HAGIO: You may remember that the last time I visited Kyoto Seika University, I talked about Tezuka's Shinsengumi in my lecture [19]. It was this comic that made me decide to become a cartoonist. The protagonist joins the Shinsengumi, and there he becomes very close friends with another young man, called Oka-chan. But Oka-chan turns out to be a spy, and the protagonist is obliged to kill him. He has to choose between loyalty to his group, or rescuing his friend. I sympathized so much with the situation of the hero, that I found myself reading the book as if I were him. I completely synchronized with him. When that happens, you become emotionally involved with the story in a strange way that is beyond words. "I know how you feel. I know exactly how you feel!" [Laughs.]

I was surprised at myself, and I realized for the first time that comics were capable of having such an impact on a reader, and I thought, "If you can affect someone in this way, I'd like to take a serious stab at it myself." Before that, I had really liked comics, and I would talk with my friend about how to present work to a publisher and things like that, but I also worried about not being able to sell my work, or even how to go to the publisher's offices. [Laughs.] If I couldn't sell my work, how could I make a living? In other words, I was fretting about things not having directly to do with the comics themselves. And I would think, "I can't really become a pro cartoonist." I was finding reasons to run away from it. "I'll just have to make it a hobby."

THORN: This was in high school?

HAGIO: Right. In my first and second year of high school, when I was beginning to think about my future. And it was just around that time that Ishimori came out with An Introduction to Cartooning and An Introduction to Cartooning, Continued [1965 and 1966]. In those books he talks about how he got to be a cartoonist, and how poor he was when he was younger. He would buy a single daikon radish, and live on that for a week. [Laughs.] Stories like that. And I would think, "Living for a week on daikon!? I hate daikon!" [Laughs.] But after I read Tezuka's Shinsengumi, I thought, "I'll try it even if I have to live on daikon for a week." I became serious about cartooning. I started looking for publishers and submitting work. I submitted for about two years. About 10 different pieces I sent here and there.

THORN: "Here and there"?

HAGIO: I sent to Kodansha, and once I sent a piece to COM. COM was --

THORN: -- the magazine Tezuka was putting out.

HAGIO: Right [20]. And then there was Shueisha. Shueisha had its annual comics awards, but each month on the pages of Special Edition Margaret, they invited submissions of 16-page stories, so I sent several stories to them.

THORN: And you were still in high school then?

HAGIO: From the time I was in high school till I was a first-year student in design school.

THORN: And you were reading COM from the time it began?

HAGIO: Yes, from the beginning.

THORN: That was 1967.

HAGIO: That's right. From the first issue. And I had to worry about the books and magazines I bought. I had them hidden in the back of my closet. [Laughter.]

THORN: Is that right? A few years back, Tomoko Naka [21] gave me the copy of the first issue of COM that she had kept for all these years.

HAGIO: Did she?

THORN: Yes. So I show that to my students in my History of Manga class and brag that I got it from Tomoko Naka. [Laughter.]

Am I right in thinking that it was serious comics fans that were the core readers of COM?

HAGIO: Yes. I remember being excited to see so many comics lovers in one place [22]. There was another magazine at the time called GARO.

THORN: Right.

HAGIO: It featured Sanpei Shirato [23]. I suppose you could say it represented the "hardcore." But frankly I never really liked it. I read it, and I thought Shirato's work was great.

THORN: Other than Shirato's work, what were the comics in GARO like in those days?

HAGIO: I must have read a lot of them, but all I have left is a really dark impression. [Laughs.]

THORN: Gekiga, that sort of thing?

HAGIO: Gekiga, psycho mysteries, that sort of thing. Mostly stories about youthful anguish from a male perspective.

THORN: I see. My image of GARO is "Screw-Style." The magazine is still around. It's been cancelled and revived a few times. Mostly stuff that lacks mass appeal. [Laughs.]

HAGIO: Right.

THORN: I think it was in 1967 that COM ran a roundtable discussion about girls' comics. The women who participated were mostly really young readers, and these men were basically asking them, "Why would anyone want to read such drivel?" [Laughter.] And just a few years later, they did a special issue on girls' comics, and the gist was that girls' comics were now more interesting than boys' comics.

HAGIO: Oh, really.

THORN: Yes. That issue featured a roundtable with you, Keiko Takemiya [24], Toshiko Ueda, and, let's see, Ichijo...

HAGIO: Yukari Ichijo.

THORN: Right.

HAGIO: Oh, really? Now that you mention it, I do have a vague recollection of something like that, but I can't remember the details.

THORN: It included a photo of you.

HAGIO: Oh, really? [Laughter.]

THORN: I think you were about 20.

HAGIO: That sounds about right. That was when I was occasionally visiting Tokyo, before I moved there. Anyway, I was raised in a home where comics were completely disparaged. I was so grateful to be able to become a girls' comics artist, and to get to the point where I could do comics professionally. I couldn't have cared less that male cartoonists were saying girls' comics were drivel, because anything they could say would be preferable to what my parents were saying. [Laughter.]

THORN: I see. At least you were both cartoonists.

HAGIO: Right. In a perverse sense, my parents taught me a lot in that respect. [Laughs.]

THORN: So your debut piece was the short story "Lulu and Mimi." [1969]

HAGIO: Right.

THORN: Weren't you published in COM before that?

HAGIO: No, I wasn't.

THORN: You weren't published in Guracon?

HAGIO: What's that?

THORN: The kind of fanzine that was sometimes included with COM.

HAGIO: Oh, right, right. A lot of newcomers got their start there, didn't they?

THORN: So you were first published by Kodansha.

HAGIO: Yes. When I was in my senior year of high school, I moved back to Ohmuta from Osaka, and I heard that there was a cartoonist living in Ohmuta, and I went to visit her. She was a girl named Makiko Hirata. She was being published by Kodansha, and she was the same age as me. She was doing pro work while she was still in high school. After graduation, she moved to Tokyo, and she told me that if I were interested, she would introduce me to her editor. After I graduated, I entered a design school back home, and after I had drawn a few stories, I went to Tokyo and Makiko Hirata took me to Kodansha. The editor there told me to send him something before the end of the month. It was just 15 days or so.

THORN: How many pages?

HAGIO: I think he told me between 20 and 25 pages.

THORN: All of a sudden. [Laughter.] "Finish it in two weeks."

HAGIO: Right. He didn't tell me they'd actually publish it, but since I said "Yes," I had to do it. [Laughs.] So I did.

THORN: And that was "Lulu and Mimi"?

HAGIO: Right.

THORN: So you didn't really hit it off with the editors at Kodansha?

HAGIO: I think I did about seven stories for them. During that time they gave me a new editor [25], but both editors followed company policy, which was not to let artists do whatever they want, but to have artists do something that fits the theme of whatever project they are currently doing. Their idea was that a magazine without such projects or featured themes was no magazine at all. I can understand that as a concept for creating a magazine, but their themes did not fit the kind of thing I wanted to do. [Laughs.] I wanted to do sci-fi, that sort of thing.

THORN: In those days [Kodansha's girls' magazine] Nakayoshi didn't carry that sort of thing. Or rather, no girls' magazines back then carried that sort of thing, right?

HAGIO: Right. At the time, the hot genre was sports stories. [Sighs.] I liked reading those stories, stuff like Star of the Giants and Viva! Volleyball [26], but I didn't think I could do such a fast-paced story myself. [Laughter.]

THORN: No, I don't think you could.

HAGIO: So I would send them story ideas that I wanted to do, and every idea was rejected, every finished story I sent was rejected. [Laughter.] So I thought, "How am I going to eat?" [Laughs.] And there's a big gap between what I want to do and what they want me to do. And I thought, "There's no way I can become a pro this way." So I wondered if I should change my direction. But I want to draw what I want to draw, right?

THORN: Right.

HAGIO: So I wondered if I should give up trying to be a pro and just be satisfied doing amateur, self-published work. This was about two years that I was in this situation.

The O-izumi Salon

THORN: You were in Fukuoka during this time?

HAGIO: Right. So I would have maybe 10 stories I wanted to do, and I would think, "Of these 10, this one might be accepted," so I'd work on that one. And I thought it would just be that way indefinitely. So during this time, when school was out, I went to Tokyo to give them a piece, and the editor told me that Keiko Takemiya was holed up trying to meet a deadline, and asked if I wouldn't go and help her out. Takemiya had been published in COM, and I think she had also been published in Margaret, or was it Special Edition Margaret? But she was also in Nakayoshi. Anyway, she was all over the place, and was quite a famous rookie.

THORN: So Takemiya's pro debut preceded your own?

HAGIO: Oh, of course. I told the editor, "Yes, I'm familiar with her work," and he said "She's familiar with your work, too." So I went and assisted her.

Takemiya asked me if I was planning to move to Tokyo. I told her that my parents were worried about sending me off to the city by myself, and that first I would have to convince them. I also told her I was having trouble selling my work, and was worried that I wouldn't be able to make a living if I came to Tokyo. So -- even though we were both there doing work for Kodansha -- she said, "I know an editor at Shogakukan. Would you like me to introduce you?"

THORN: And that was Junya Yamamoto [27].

HAGIO: That was Junya Yamamoto. So I sent the roughs of the stories that had been rejected by Kodansha to Takemiya's apartment, and asked if she could show them to Yamamoto. The stories I sent were "Holy Night on Sailor Hill," "The Fife of the White Boy in the White Forest," "Maudlin" and I think there was one other.

THORN: One of these? [Matt shows her a list of her earliest published works.] Maybe "Bianca"?

HAGIO: No, I did "Bianca" for Kodansha. Was it "Poor Mama"? Yes, that was it. I had drawn it as a 16-page story, but Yamamoto said he would publish it, so I turned it into a 32-page story. Anyway, I sent these, and Yamamoto said, "I'll buy them all." And I thought, "Great! Now I can eat." [Laughter.]

And then Takemiya contacted me and said, "I'm thinking of moving. Would you like to share an apartment with me?"

THORN: So you were still in Fukuoka?

HAGIO: Right. So I thought, "I can use this to convince my parents to let me go."

THORN: And it worked?

HAGIO: It worked.

THORN: Did you have a hard time convincing them?

HAGIO: They thought I'd be back after about a year. [Laughter.] So I took my savings, and my parents gave me 10,000 yen as a going-away present, and I moved to Tokyo. We lived together for about two years in a place called O-izumi. Living catty-corner to us was a woman named Norie Masuyama who really loved comics.

THORN: But she wasn't a cartoonist herself?

HAGIO: No, she wasn't. For a while I think she worked as what you might call Takemiya's "brain staff." We had so many different people hanging out there. It was a very interesting two years.

THORN: This was the famous "O-izumi Salon."

HAGIO: [Laughs.] It was more like "O-izumi Row-house." When I first heard that name, I thought, "Huh? Who came up with that one?" [Laughter.] It's pretty embarrassing, really.

THORN: Was it an apartment?

HAGIO: No, it really was an old row-house.

THORN: Did it have a name?

HAGIO: No, no name. It was one building divided into two houses. I can't remember who lived on the house to the left, but we lived on the right. There was a four-and-a-half tatami mat room on the first, and a three-mat room and six-mat room on the second [28]. It was very small.

THORN: So you and Takemiya lived there for two years?

HAGIO: Right. Originally, we planned for just one year, but at the end of the year we decided to stay for one more year.

THORN: And who were some of the people who hung out there during those two years?

HAGIO: Oh, there were a lot of them. The one who came the most was Nanae Sasaya [29]. She once came and stayed over for six months. [Laughter.]

THORN: That's not "staying over." I think the common term for such a person is "freeloader." [Laughter.]

HAGIO: But then again, I once visited Sasaya in Hokkaido and stayed for a month. [Laughs.] She would draw her stories for [Shueisha Publishing's magazine] Ribbon at O-izumi. She did "The Boy from Dartmoor" there. Mineko Yamada [30] came to help her out with that work. Ryoko Yamagishi and Jun Morita used to hang out, too [31].

THORN: What about Yasuko Sakata?

HAGIO: Oh, that's right. Yasuko Sakata used to come from Kanazawa City [in Ishikawa Prefecture]. And so did Akiko Hatsu [32]. They came a lot. This was before they became pros. I think they were still college students.

THORN: And Shio Satoh?

HAGIO: Right, she came as an assistant. Well, actually I got a fan letter from her, and it was so interesting I invited her to come visit us. She said she was hoping to become a professional cartoonist, so I asked her to help me.

THORN: She reminds me of you, personality-wise [33].

HAGIO: [Laughs.] Yes, I suppose so. And there was a woman named Ikumi Ikeda who later moved back to Hokkaido. And then there was Aiko Itoh. It was always lively.

THORN: Were you interested in European literature at the time?

HAGIO: At that time, I was into [Hermann] Hesse. I read everything I could find by Hesse. I was also into [Ray] Bradbury for a long time.

THORN: And [Jean] Cocteau?

HAGIO: Cocteau was a shock. If you think about it, his is a pretty sick world. [Laughter.] The protagonist does nothing at all, and everything's so dark.

THORN: But that's what made it appealing, right?

HAGIO: Exactly. [Laughs.]

THORN: How about movies?

HAGIO: There was A Death in Venice. [Laughs.] 2001: A Space Odyssey came along, too, so I went to see that. The price of a movie suddenly went up to 700 yen, so deciding to see a film was a serious business. [Laughter.] But it's a lot more than that now, isn't it?

THORN: It is expensive.

FOOTNOTES

19. Shinsengumi was a group of samurai, all skilled swordsmen, dedicated to the defense of the embattled Shogunate in the middle of the 19th century. Click here for more information.
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20. COM was Osamu Tezuka's anthology "Magazine for the Comics Elite" (according to the copy on the cover) and ran from 1967 to 1972. It was begun partly as a forum for Tezuka's now-classic Phoenix series, but became a forum for young artists eager to break free of the limitations of the children's magazines. Ishimori's Fantasy World Jun was serialized in COM.
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21. Tomoko Naka (probably born around 1955) is an artist whose work is frequently described as tanbi, which directly translates as "a fondness for beautiful things," but which is specifically associated with images of elegant and handsome yet effeminate men, and with homoeroticism. She creates stories of rich, idle, yet nonetheless lovable European nobility who get themselves into and out of a variety of personal and sometimes public troubles.
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22. COM had a lively letters column, and occasionally included an extra volume that was a collection of work by young, unknown amateurs. In addition to the comics, there were essays and articles, and roundtable discussions about various topics in comics.
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23. Sanpei Shirato (born 1932) is best known for the Marxist-inspired Legend of Kamui and The Ninja Book of Martial Arts. The former was the centerpiece of the anthology GARO throughout the magazine's early years, but Yoshiharu Tsuge's short classic "Screw-Style" is more representative of the underground flavor the magazine is famous for.
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24. Keiko Takemiya (born 1950) - See the article on the Magnificent Forty-Niners in The Comics Journal #269.
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25. Japanese anthology magazines have a number of editors, and each artist is assigned an editor. The editor-in-chief can change the editor at any time, and in a big publishing house, editors are regularly moved from one magazine to another, the idea being that they can get a variety of experience within the company, making them more useful when they are eventually (if ever) promoted to positions of greater authority.
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26. Star of the Giants (1966, Ikki Kajiwara and Noboru Kawasaki) was a hugely popular (and in retrospect, comically over-the-top) boys' baseball story, and Viva! Volleyball (1968, Chikae Ide) was a girls' comics by an artist famous for drawing eyes that were dazzling even by the standards of girls' comics of the day.
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27. Junya Yamamoto (born 1938) - See the article on the Magnificent Forty-Niners in The Comics Journal #269.
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28. A tatami mat is about 180 X 90 cm (6' X 3'), so the rooms would be 270 X 270 cm (8' 10" X 8' 10"), 270 X 180 (8' 10" X 6'), and 270 X 360 cm (8' 10" X 12'), respectively.
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29. Nanae Sasaya (born 1950) See the article on the Magnificent Forty-Niners in The Comics Journal #269.
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30. Mineko Yamada (year of birth not known, but probably around 1950) See the article on the Magnificent Forty-Niners in The Comics Journal #269.
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31. Ryoko Yamagishi (born 1947) See the article on the Magnificent Forty-Niners in The Comics Journal #269. Jun Morita (born 1948) was famous for romantic comedies, and for her unusually sexy female characters. Drawing characters with hourglass figures in a genre where "test-tube figures" were and are the norm garnered Morita a good many male fans. In recent years she has worked mainly in the genre of "ladies' comics."
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32. Yasuko Sakata (born 1953) is often categorized as a member of the "Post Forty-Niners." She began working professionally in 1975, and remains active today. She is one of a very small number of Japanese cartoonists who, despite specializing in short works, has maintained high name-recogition throughout her career. Akiko Hatsu is the younger sister of the late Yukiko Kai, another member of the "Post Forty-Niners" whose brief but impressive career came to an end when she died of stomach cancer in 1980. Hatsu was also a popular adjunct instructor in Kyoto Seika University's Department of Comic Art until health problems forced her to resign that post this year.
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33. Shio Satoh (probably born around 1952) is another artist often categorized as a "Post Forty-Niners" member. Though not as prolific as most of her contemporaries, her carefully crafted science fiction has a solid following. Her "Changeling" (1989) was translated into English by Matt Thorn for Viz Comics in 1995, but she is better known in Japan for her longer works, The Dreaming Planet (1980) and One Zero (1984).
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[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #269.]

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