The gentle art of drawing (part 2)

“I want to draw a tank, but I’m not very good at it. Mom, draw me a tank…,” “Draw me a plane…” the kids begged, holding out a piece of paper and a pencil. But how many mothers can just take that pencil into their hands and draw what was asked?

Happy Mother’s Day! Definitions of what constitutes motherhood and motherly activities is ever evolving. Judging from a children’s drawing book Yasashi e no kakikata: ryakuga no e tehon (The Simple Way to Draw: A Guidebook to Simplified Sketching) it seems that mothers in wartime Japan had to know how to draw military tanks for their kids. In the second installment of her fascinating article, Maddy Willette delves into the nature of the censorship the book received after Japan’s defeat.

During my internship at the Gordon W. Prange Collection, I knew I wanted to focus the research portion of my duties on censorship. I found the idea of Allied Censorship – the hypocritical mission to spread freedom and democracy through suppressing media – incredibly fascinating. Due to the accessibility of children’s books and manga through the digitized collection, I decided to focus my research efforts here and began reading through censored materials in search of a topic. The search led me back to The Simple Way to Draw: A Guidebook to Simplified Sketching by Onodera Shufu (see Part One of this article). The book was submitted to the CCD (Civil Censorship Detachment) not as a galley proof, but in its first edition, and included two colophons: both an original and a new hand-printed one. The original colophon’s date was for 1943, two years before the end of the war. Meanwhile, the new colophon was dated for 1946, after the Allied Forces had begun their Occupation. The original run had only 10,000 copies, and a new publisher was looking to reprint the book and publish another 10,000. It was under these conditions that Yasashi e no kakikata was submitted to the CCD (Tani, p. 250).*

*谷暎子の「占領下の児童出版物とGHQの検閲」

Fig. 1 Original (left) and new (right) colophons in Yasashi e no kakikata

Therein lies what makes this book so unique – it was written for a Japan at war and not for the watchful eyes of the CCD. It made no efforts to censor itself, and the CCD responded by censoring it in full. This makes it arguably one of the most comprehensive materials in the collection for understanding CCD censorship in the realm of children’s books. It is also unique in the fact it doubles as a glimpse into the all-encompassing scope of total war in wartime Japan. 

Still, as explored in Part One of this essay, this book stands out for different reasons when compared to the rest of the how-to-draw books in the Prange collection. Not only is it the longest, it is by far the most comprehensive. Unlike others, it not only provides example images, but instructions and advice to make your art better. Such descriptions of methodology are extremely rare amongst the drawing books in the Prange’s collection, and after careful examination, I believe it to be the best when it comes to actually learning to draw.

Thus, as a student in art history, I want to examine this book from both perspectives – how can we evaluate the artistic practices it describes, and what does it teach us from a historical perspective? In my mind, the book can only be truly understood if we look at it from both perspectives. So I want to now turn to the historical and asl ourselves: what is censored in the book, what isn’t, and how can this inform our understanding of both war-time and occupation-era Japan?

Given the mention of tanks in the foreword, it is no surprise that the book was heavily censored. For a start, a list of pages that had identifiable issues was sandwiched in the front cover. One book I referenced included a table that listed these pages and what was censored on each one, which I have translated below. But what this table doesn’t account for are the numerous pages that were deleted. For one, pages 70-91 were dedicated to images of soldiers and the military, and all of these pages were deleted in full. The entire foreword was also removed, as well as some designs featuring bombs on page 240 and an image of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere that follows the original colophon.

Fig. 2 Censorship Actions in Yasashi e no kakikata (Tani, p. 251)

Page	Chapter Title	Page Title	Censored Image
6	Yasashi e no kakikata (The Simple Way to Draw)	Saa e wo kaki hajimemasho (Well then, let’s get sketching!)	The word “tank” (tanku)  in the text is to be changed to “train” (densha).
7	Yasashi e no kakikata (The Simple Way to Draw)	Tanku (tank)	Directions on how to draw a tank are to be deleted.
30	Omoshiroi manga no kakikata (How to Draw Funny Manga)	Boku sugata no okasan (mom prepared for an air raid)	“An air raid” (boku) is to be changed to “firefighting” (boka).
51	Omoshiroi manga no kakikata (How to Draw Funny Manga)	Kage e no iro iro (various silhouettes)	The image of a soldier raising a gun and running into battle is to be removed.
57	Omoshiroi manga no kakikata (How to Draw Funny Manga)	Omoshiroi kawari e (funny changing pictures)	Image of the “daring soldier” (isamashi heitai san) is to be removed.
61	Omoshiroi manga no kakikata (How to Draw Funny Manga)	Kumiawase e no shuju (Various images made of shapes)	The soldier on the horse is to be removed.
92	Kodomo no asobi (Playing Children)	Kodomo no asobi (Playing Children)	The children playing pretend soldier is to be removed
134	Undo no sugata (Playing Sports)	Judo, Kendo	Depictions of judo and kendo are to be removed.
147	Kakushu shokugyo (Various Occupations)	Roke-shon (On Set)	The scene of a samurai fighting in a shoot for a historical drama is to be removed.
231	Fuzoku iroiro (Various Customs)	Boku sugata samazama (Scenes of Air Raids)	The word “air raids” (boku) is to be changed to “firefighting” (boka).
233	Fuzoku iroiro (Various Customs)	Kyoeiken no hitobito (Peoples of the Co-prosperity Sphere)	The rising sun ornamenting the clothes of a “Southeast Asian” is to be removed. [Translator’s note: it appears to be a flag she is holding, not a design on her clothes]
239	Katto to Oyo zuan (Illustrations and Practical Designs)	Katto to Oyo zuan (Illustrations and Practical Designs)	Triangle with the flag of the rising sun, a helmet, and a shell case is to be removed.
241	Katto to Oyo zuan (Illustrations and Practical Designs)	Shugei zuan (Textile Designs)	The airplanes in the fan design “Mt. Fuji and Airplanes” (Fujisan to hikoki) are to be removed　[Translator’s note: I believe this was meant to reference images on page 240, as nothing is marked for deletion on page 241]

From this, we can see that the book received heavy censorship. In fact, the book was never published (Tani, p. 250). But within this list of censored pages, there are many details to note. Twice, the word “boku” (air raid) is changed to “boka” (firefighting), indicating the ubiquity of air-raid related images in the book and suggesting what would today be considered a morose casualness in considering the topic (that is, indicating the ubiquity of air-raids in real life). Quite a few of these instances seem rather innocuous for constituting removal–judo and kendo, while being martial arts related to the army, are not necessarily direct images of the army, and even an image of an actor performing as a samurai on camera is removed on page 147. Also deleted is the whole three-page foreword, dedicated mostly to expressing Onodera’s desire for everyone to be able to draw while heavily mixing in topics of war. As it seems worthy of special consideration, I have translated the text in its entirety which can be found

here.

(To be continued in Part Three…)

Madeleine Willette is an undergraduate student majoring in Art History and Japanese at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is currently studying abroad at Kyoto University.

The gentle art of drawing (part 1)

Above: Images drawn by Maddy Willette following guides in “Yasashii e no kakikata”

Happy Children’s Day! To mark Kodomo no Hi (子供の日), celebrated every May 5th in Japan, we bring to you an article by Madeleine (“Maddy”) Willette who during her internship at the Prange (Fall semester ’23) conducted research on a drawing book for children. Putting to use her considerable Japanese-language skills and graphic arts training she engaged hands on with the book, testing the drawing instructions and translating significant passages in the text. For reasons which will be elaborated in this three-part blog post, Maddy concludes that Yasashi e no kakikata: ryakuga no e tehon (The Simple Way to Draw: A Guidebook to Simplified Sketching) is “undeniably an irreplaceable work in the Prange’s collections.”

I first encountered Yasashi e no kakikata: ryakuga no e tehon (The Simple Way to Draw: A Guidebook to Simplified Sketching) on a visit to the Prange Collection in a Japanese art history class. The copy features many crossed out images, including tanks, warplanes, and grenades. My classmates and I gawked at the overt militaristic nature of these images and the surprisingly lengthy section they comprised. I remember picking up the book and deciding to read the foreword, which I have translated into English later in this article. This only exacerbated my shock, for the first line was a child begging their parents, “I want to draw a tank, but I’m not very good at it. Mom, draw me a tank….” I could tell the book was a remnant from a Japan I had never known.

Despite its militaristic themes, Yasashi e no kakikata: ryakuga no e tehon (The Simple Way to Draw: A Guidebook to Simplified Sketching) serves as an amazingly comprehensive guide to drawing, and it sticks out among the numerous how-to-draw-books in the Prange for this very reason. The first section contains a few step-by-step guides to drawing some popular imagery, including a monkey, a car, people, and the tank the kid was begging their parents to draw in the foreword. These examples illustrate how simple shapes and lines can come together to form objects, the basis of any serious foray into drawing. Since I wanted to evaluate the instructional aspect of the book as well, I followed some of these instructions, and my results can be found below. While I admittedly have quite a bit of formal arts training, I found the instructions very easy to follow, despite the results being quite simplistic. Similar step-by-step guides can be found in limited number in some other of the Prange’s how-to-draw-books, such as Saishin ryakuga honten and Ryakuga no kakikata shogakko jido no renshuyo.

Onodera was mainly a comic artist and illustrator, and thus, he has a section on “How to Draw Funny Manga (Omoishiroi manga no kakikata),” beginning on page 32. This section includes many pages of instructional text, as well as examples of how to put that advice into practice. It is also the most fleshed-out descriptive section of the book. It starts with a brief comparison between a true-to-life drawing of a tanuki and a mangafied version, explaining that the key to drawing interesting comic images is to exaggerate real features. He then begins to explain the key to drawing faces, explaining the general shape of the face, how different people have different features, and again echoing his earlier advice that the key was to exaggerate these features when depicting people in a manga-style, considering “the outline of their face, their features, and their personalities” (p. 35). He continues this with a section about expressions. He again reiterates the importance of exaggeration and differentiation in the expressions of different characters (for example, he describes that young children have more exaggerated expressions than adults.) He moves onto explaining how to draw the body through posed stick-figures before moving into brief sections on how to depict animals in manga (and how to anthropomorphize them). how to depict plants, and how to depict vehicles.

When I was younger, I aspired to one day draw manga myself, and thus, I read all the books and watched all the videos on drawing manga I could find. In Yasashi e no kakikata, I was delighted to find all the most influential advice I had heard over the years present in this section. While many of the how-to-draw books I referenced would teach the technical aspects of how to draw (for example, starting with a circle for a face, adding the chin, then the facial features, etc.), they did not teach how to turn the “manga-style” into lively characters that could go into a comic page. Meanwhile, this is exactly the focus of Onodera; he does not describe these technical step-by-step instructions, but instead focuses on the bigger-picture aspects of drawing a comic, teaching the importance of vivid facial expressions, positioning, and how to mangafy real-life objects, animals, and people. When I was younger and desperately trying to learn how to draw people in manga, I always had issues with posing–without a reference, I couldn’t seem to draw just about any pose besides someone standing up straight, and none of my drawing books that taught how to break the body into shapes (while helpful) could help. It wasn’t until I came across a video that taught how to pose simple stick figures and then use them as reference that my problems were solved, and that is exactly the technique that Onodera includes in his book. While I had only used the technique to pose singular figures in the past, Onodera included a variety of reference stick-figures, some including multiple figures or even horses. When I attempted to use them as reference for my own drawings, I was pleased with the results, which can be found below.  

Fig. 2 Images I Drew Following the Pose Examples in Yasashi e no kakikata

While the majority of Yasashi e no kakikata is not about the process of drawing but a collection of images to use for drawing references, this combination makes it both an incredibly strong drawing book and sets it apart from other drawing books in the Prange’s collection. All others only served one of these two purposes, with all but one almost solely being simple collections of reference drawings. Of these, the most interesting one (in my opinion) is titled Omoshiroi sugaku no ryakugacho dobutsu no maki (Funny Math Drawings: Animal Ver.) and is a collection of animals drawn entirely from numbers. Additionally, it features English names for all the animals, suggesting American influence and also providing some hilarious typos, such as “habibut” for “halibut” and “mandarin ducd” instead of “mandarin duck.”

Fig. 3,4 “Habibut” and “Mandarin duck” from Omoshiroi sugaku no ryakugacho dobutsu no maki

Only one other book, Suketchi no kakikata (How to Sketch), features any comprehensive advice on how to actually draw. While Yasashi e no kakikata focuses on how to draw comics and illustrations, Suketchi no kakikata focuses on the art of pencil drawing, covering how to break down objects into shapes, shading, and composition. Because the focus is “sketching,” it briefly touches on the idea of coloring at the end, but instead mostly stays in the realm of drawing. This serves as a contrast with Yasashi e no kakikata, which makes no reference to shading or coloring whatsoever. All in all, Suketchi no kakikata clearly serves a different niche than Yasashi e no kakikata, but it is also much shorter, measuring around 30 pages in length while Yasashi e no kakikata has upwards of 200. Also, unlike Yasashi e no kakikata, Suketchi no kakikata does not include any extensive example images, instead mostly focusing on technique and theory.

Fig. 5 Suketchi no kakikata

Thus, Yasashi e no kakikata serves as an excellent guide and reference to drawing. In his foreword, Onodera Shufu writes that, “through this book, I pray everyone discards their mistaken belief that drawing is difficult and gains the ability to draw simple and fun pictures of whatever their heart desires.” Lofty as that goal may be, his detailed explanations on the basics of drawing (especially in the genre of manga), surely gets him closer to accomplishing this goal than any other book in the Prange’s collection. 

[To be continued in Part Two]

Madeleine Willette is an undergraduate student majoring in Art History and Japanese at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is currently studying abroad at Kyoto University.

Class Visit: The Atomic Bomb in Literature and Memory (JAPN 425)

An important outreach activity here at the Prange Collection is providing teaching and instruction to our most immediate local audience: faculty & students at the University of Maryland College Park. This spring semester we welcomed Professor Michele Mason and her students from a course titled “The Atomic Bomb in Literature and Memory”.

Prange Curator Kana Jenkins with UMD students

Course description: Study of declassified documents and commentary on the United States decision to use the bomb in 1945, the many ways Japanese writers have attempted to express their indescribable experiences in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the shaping of historical narratives and national identities in post-war Japan and the U.S. Taught in English.

The students made visits to the Prange on two occasions where they viewed primary materials related to the atomic bomb, including medical journals such as Sogo Igaku (総合医学; S2452 ) which, as early as October 1945, published an article titled “On the atomic bomb, emergency measures from a medical perspective”. It received censorship from Occupation authorities.

As Japanese was not a requirement for this course, items selected for viewing included graphic materials such as picture books, comics and color slides, as well as bilingual publications such as “Tokyo Fall of 1945” (DS-0906) which offers a pictorial account of destruction and recovery in Tokyo, and the August 1949 Hiroshima issue of the photo magazine “Asahi Gurafu”(A379.1).

A Talk by Stella Li : ““Jazz Nation, Jazz Culture:”Jazz Discourse in Early Occupied Japan’s Mass Print Media”

Stella Li, a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and recipient of a 20th Century Japan Research Award, will give a talk on “Jazz Nation, Jazz Culture:”Jazz Discourse in Early Occupied Japan’s Mass Print Media“ on Monday, May 6, at 12:30-1:30pm (EST) online.

Zoom Link: https://umd.zoom.us/j/8404739029?omn=91817058510

The event is free and open to the public. This event is co-sponsored by the University of Maryland Libraries and the Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies.

Featured Publication: “IGAGURI: Young Judo Master” by Fukui Eiichi

Igaguri: Young Judo Master by Fukui Eiichi
Includes in-depth essay by Ryan Holmberg “Fukui Eiichi and the Judo Manga Revolution.”

Published by Bubbles Press:

THE ORIGINAL MARTIAL ARTS MANGA! Starring a young judo prodigy who is as virtuous as he is strong, Fukui Eiichi’s Igaguri (1952-54) marks the true beginning of dynamic martial arts and sports comics in Japan. For the first time in English, read the manga that revolutionized shonen manga, reignited interest in judo among Japanese kids, and drove god of manga Tezuka Osamu mad with jealousy. With a dojo-busting essay about Fukui’s life and Igaguri’s impact by award-winning historian and translator Ryan Holmberg, this edition is a must-have for all manga fans!

Trailblazer of postwar shonen manga, Fukui Eiichi was born in Tokyo in 1921. After a career as an animator during and after World War II, Fukui redefined how manga were drawn and written with his best-selling Igaguri for the magazine Adventure King. Due to poor health and overwork, he died suddenly at the height of his career at the age of 33, yet his influence continues to shape martial arts and sports comics to today.

352 Pages | B & W w/ color illustrations throughout essay | 7 1/2″ x 8″ “| French-flapped sofcover | heavy newsprint interior
ISBN: 9781737826422

Recipients of the 20th Century Japan Research Awards for 2024

We are delighted to announce the following recipients of the 20th Century Japan Research Awards for 2024. Congratulations!

• Eike Exner (Independent Scholar) whose project title is “A Comparative Study of Visual Influences Seen in Occupation-era Manga.”
• Suhyun Choi (Ph.D candidate, Columbia University) whose project title is “Transnational Socialism and the Development of Realist Painting in Japan and North Korea, 1945-1980.” 

The Award, first offered in 1999, is co-sponsored by the Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies and the University of Maryland Libraries.

Each year these partners accept applications for grants to support research in the Gordon W. Prange and East Asia Collections on topics related to the period of the Allied Occupation of Japan and its aftermath, 1945-1960.

Reflections of a student intern on working with Prange materials

[This guest post was written by Madeleine Willette, an undergraduate student majoring in Art History and Japanese at the University of Maryland, College Park.]

I first heard about the Gordon W. Prange collection during my first semester at UMD. It was Fall 2020, and Covid-19 had made sure that my introduction to university life took place in my childhood bedroom. The class was JAPN407 (The Art of Translation), and we had been assigned to translate a chapter of one of the manga available in the digitized children’s book collection, although I no longer recall the title. The language was difficult, written in script that had become antiquated and full of references to Japanese cultural items that were difficult to translate into English.  However, it expanded my horizons as to what types of text were out there to translate, making me realize the value of the collection and the luck I had to be at the university that housed it.

In other classes too, I was lucky to get more chances to visit the collection – this time in person – and learned more about the history of Occupation censorship. I also got to touch and read through some of the materials. With each visit, I became even more taken with the collection, and I became interested in interning there. As a double major in Japanese and Art History, it seemed to be a perfect fit for me. Not only would I be able to practice Japanese and learn about Japanese history and culture, but I would also get a sense as to what it was like working in the archives. These became the goals of my internship.

Cataloging kajoshiki (加除式) law books

My time in the Prange was largely divided into two halves. During the first few months, I was assigned with organizing and cataloging their collection of kajoshiki (加除式）law books. These books were bound with leather cord and were designed to be updated as laws were changed, added, and removed. There were about 150 of these, mostly focused on laws of specific prefectures.

Since I was able to organize and catalog them rather expediently due to their shared naming conventions and publishers, I also got to start the task of organizing and cataloging the piles of documents that stood beside them. Interestingly, almost every single one were pages to be added or removed to the kajoshiki law books. Based on their titles, it seemed that new or changed laws would be sent out like magazine issues, containing the pages that needed to be replaced and instructions on how to properly add them to the book.

However, I never got too far in this task, as once October hit, I spent most of my time on my second main duty at the collection–a research project in the form of a blog post, written in both English and Japanese.

Research project based on drawing book for children

For this, I was free to choose any topic that interested me, and I decided I would look into censorship. I began working with this theme on a basic level, deciding to choose a specific topic once I had read through some censored materials. Due to the convenience of the digital collection, I focused my review on children’s books, and eventually, I decided to focus on a book called Yasashi e no kakikata: ryakuga no e tehon (The Simple Way to Draw: A Guidebook to Simplified Sketching) by Onodera Shufu.

The book was originally published during the war, and it had been submitted to the CDC for republishing. Because of this, it serves as an excellent snapshot of the culture of war-time Japan, and it featured some interesting inconsistencies in its censorship. It also stands out for its main purpose as a drawing book, offering excellent advice and being much more comprehensive than the other drawing books in the Prange’s collection. These qualities served as the focus of my project, and I describe them in detail in my blog post.

Translations and academic writing in Japanese

I worked on this project down to my very last day in the Prange, and I am incredibly proud of what I accomplished. Not only was it a valuable opportunity to work with primary source materials, it also served as an excellent practice in writing academic content in a more casual format. I also translated some of the written text in Yasashi e no kakikata, which was outside of the types of translations I typically do but excellent preparation for a possible future career in research.

But most importantly, writing the Japanese version was invaluable to my education, as it was my first opportunity to really write something academic in Japanese. While I had attended Japanese high school for a year as an exchange student, I had never been assigned an essay, and I always worried about my writing skills in Japanese. This is by far the longest thing I have ever written in my second-language, and it served as valuable experience as well as a confidence booster. This is especially important since I will be heading to Kyoto University next semester to study art history, where writing similar essays in Japanese will become a must.

Overall, I am incredibly proud of what I accomplished in the Prange collection and believe it was an invaluable part of my education at the University of Maryland. It gave me an opportunity to work in an archive and learn how collections like this are managed, and the research portion made me a better writer and researcher in both Japanese and English. These were exactly my goals when I came into the Prange, and I believe that I was able to complete each and every one.

Maddie’s article on Onodera Shufu’s Yasashi e no kakikata: ryakuga no e tehon (The Simple Way to Draw: A Guidebook to Simplified Sketching) will be published in upcoming blog posts – please stay tuned!

Spring Break Closure (2024)

“Tanoshii kusatsumi/たのしい　くさつみ” Yonen Ehon/幼年えほん (Prange Call No. Y295), 3/1/1949.

The Prange Collection will be closed from Monday, March 18 through Sunday, March 24 for the University of Maryland Spring Break.

We will resume our postings in late March.

Featured Gift Collection – Donald H. Swann papers

We are pleased to announce one of our new gift collection acquisitions – Donald H. Swann papers!

Donald Swann (1926-1964) served in the U.S. Army from 1944-1946.  He was posted in Tokyo and Hachinohe, Japan, during the Allied Occupation of Japan.   While he was in service, he sent letters, photographs, and postcards regularly to his family, describing in details about his life while serving in the U.S. Army during the very early days of Occupation of Japan.

The Swann Papers consists of 84 photographs, 135 letters, and several postcards, dated 1944 to 1946.  Swann’s letters provides us a first-hand, honest impression of a young U.S. solider toward the war, Occupation, world politics, Japan, and Japanese people.   See the link above for more contents description.

The Papers were donated to the Prange Collection by Ann S. Matteson, Donald Swann’s sister, in 2022.

The Swann Papers is open to the public and must be viewed in the Special Collections reading room at the Hornbake Library North.  Please contact us if you are interested in using the collection.

Notable Japanese Collections in North America Dashboard

Have you heard about the Notable Japanese Collections in North America Dashboard?  It was created by several members of the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources (NCC), drawing on data originally collected by NCC’s Cooperative Collection Development Working Group.

The dashboard landing page shows the North America map on which the users can locate each institutional holdings of Japan/Japanese Studies related items (both processed and unprocessed) at a glance.

When you go to the tab “Browse Collections,” you can search the dashboard by keyword, institution’s name, format of the materials, languages, time period, and the collection’s digital access.

You may find a small box labeled “Featured Special Topics” in the Browse Collections page, and find “Post-war Occupation (1945-1952)” sorting option.  The majorities of the Prange Collection’s gift collection holdings are listed in this categories, and you may also find other Occupation of Japan related collections across the North America.