Narrating history in the manga ‘Jūdō no rekishi – Kanō Jigorō no shōgai’ (1987)

Abstract

Kanō Jigorō (1860-1938), the founder of Kōdōkan Jūdō, is one of the most prominent representatives of modern Japanese martial arts and numerous books and articles have been written about his life. In this article I will focus on the biographical manga “Jūdō no rekishi – Kanō Jigorō no shōgai” (1987). This graphic biography was published under the editorship of the Kōdōkan and by analysing the techniques that are applied on the textual as well as pictorial level to create authenticity and historical facticity, we will get a better understanding of the strategies by which collective ideas and norms within a specific historical and cultural context are created in jūdō. Biographies are a hybrid genre that unfolds its effect and its power in the space between fiction and non-fiction. Biographies tell a life story by applying literary techniques: creating a narrative, (pre)structuring and – retrospectively - giving meaning to life in and for a preconceived context. Historians, accordingly, – and despite Hayden White’s general reflections on Clio’s influence on historical writings –, as well as sociologists have questioned the value of biographies for understanding the past, criticizing the genre for its “artificial creation of meaning” (Bourdieu, 1986) and reducing the biographer to a literary writer. With biographies becoming a success in popular culture, e.g. in films, manga, etc., the genre finally seems to comfortably settled in the land of fiction, far beyond reach and – maybe more important – the interest of historians. I will, however, argue that it is to early to discard biographies in popular media as ‘historical writing’.