This weekend is your last chance to see a comprehensive and FREE exhibition of work by the leading contemporary Japanese manga artist, Urasawa Naoki.

A montage of Urasawa Naoki’s manga characters which he created specially for this exhibition © URASAWA Naoki / Studio Nuts. Featuring: ‘Pineapple ARMY’ KUDO Kazuya ‘PLUTO’ NAGASAKI Takashi, Tezuka Productions, ‘MASTER KEATON’ KATSUSHIKA Hokusei, NAGASAKI Takashi, ‘MASTER KEATON ReMASTER’ NAGASAKI Takashi, ‘BILLY BAT’ NAGASAKI Takashi

The Japan House

Come out of High Street Kensington tube station, turn right, walk a hundred yards and you are at the entrance to the Japan House. Opened just last year, it is funded by Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Inside it feels like a very classy boutique and most of the ground floor is, in fact, a shop, selling exquisite and carefully chosen specimens of Japanese fabrics, jewellery, books and so on, each one an example of the Japanese passion for monozukuri, meaning craftsmanship. Kitchenware, art accessories – brushes and paper and lots more, all chosen with exquisite taste and ranged in clean, precise displays.

Interior of the Japan House. Photo by the author

There is a stand-up coffee and tea bar. At the back of the shop (at the top left of this photo) is an area devoted to tourism, which features all kinds of maps of Japan, its cities and regions. As well as the ground floor boutique, there’s a stylish Japanese restaurant – AKIRA – on the first floor.

• Dining at AKIRA

Taking the lift down to the basement, the visitor discovers there are three spaces here:

• a lecture theatre which also doubles as a movie house and can host a range of events
• a library display (basically a smallish room with carefully chosen books about all aspects of Japanese culture)
• and the main exhibition space

The Art of Urasawi Naoki

It’s a surprisingly big room and contains a surprisingly large amount of material.

What comes over immediately is that URASAWA Naoki is a kind of rock start among mangaka. Born in 1960, he is considered a direct heir of Tezuka Osamu, the founder of modern manga. He has been hugely successful with over 100 million books sold in more than 20 countries. He made his debut in 1983 with BETA! and has gone on to create and/or draw a host of hugely successful manga characters.

There are about ten big stands in the exhibition, each of which introduces one of the lead characters which has made Urasawa’s name. Each one gives a longish explanation of the lead character and their main storylines and then display 20 or so pages taken from one of the episodes which shows the character in action.

This is Manga – The Art of Urasawa Naoki @ Japan House. Photo by the author

This display gives you a complete biography of Master Keaton, full name Taichi Hiraga-Keaton, son of a Japanese father and a British mother, an Oxford graduate and former Special Air Services officer. The various plotlines have followed Keaton across Europe as he ‘solves difficult cases, fighting criminal organisations and touching people’s lives’.

The same detailed treatment, with a full biography of the character, and then a sequence of characteristic strips, is given to all his other creations:

• YAWARA!
• MONSTER
• 20th Century Boys
• MASTER KEATON ReMASTER (Story by Takashi Nagasaki)
• PLUTO (Story by Osamu Tezuka, co-authored by Takashi Nagasaki, Supervised by Macoto Tezka, with the cooperation of Tezuka Productions)
• BILLY BAT (Story Co-creator : Takashi Nagasaki)
• MUJIRUSHI (‘The Sign of Dreams’, with the cooperation of Fujio Productions)

In addition there are some massive full-colour blow-ups of various characters and scenes, dominating the walls. Some of these are deliberately designed for visitors to pose in front of and take selfies against.

Installation view of This is Manga – The Art of Urasawa Naoki @ Japan House. Photo by the author

Behind the art of Urasawi Naoki

In the photo above you can see, over on the right, that there are flat display cases in front of some of the colour blow-ups. These display Urasawa’s early sketches and ideas for characters and scenes, and offer a real insight into the creative process. You can see sketches evolving into almost complete pages, then with words and dialogue bubbles positioned over the drawings – and then the final, finished pages as printed. One of the display cases shows the very earliest sketches and cartoons Urasawa made at school. In fact there are over 400 original drawings and storyboards on display! If you’ve heard of him, and like his style, this really is a fabulous opportunity to immerse yourself in the great man’s work.

Why is Urasawa so famous, why is his manga so distinctive? I must confess, I couldn’t really see why. Having recently visited the big, noisy manga exhibition at the British Museum, I feel overwhelmed with the sheer amount of manga there is in the world. I have no idea where to start, and no idea how to make sense of the tens of thousands of stories produced by the thousands of artists for the scores of publishers, which keep on expanding in number every week.

Rather than make any attempt to explain Urasawa’s appeal I’ll copy out how the curators describe it.

Urasawa Naoki is considered a modern master in dynamic storytelling, with a unique approach to panel layout and cinematic sense of framing and rhythm. But even more so, he is considered a true master of character design. Each of his worlds hosts a wide variety of distinct, fully-rendered personas. His instantly recognisable faces come to life on the page with a wide range of expression. This talent can be witnessed on his storyboards, referred to as nēmu (‘name’) in Japanese, which reveal characters with expressions more precise and detailed than most manga artists. In this way, Urasawa defies convention to depict the diversity and sensitivity of the human race through his two-dimensional drawings.

Maybe I’m stupid, maybe I’m obtuse and imperceptive, maybe I just haven’t properly entered into the world of manga and its conventions, but I just couldn’t see this. Most of the faces, figures and characters I saw, particularly in the large blown-up images, looked very very similar to all the other manga characters I saw at the British Museum.

Here’s a typical display case of sketches with a blown-up figure behind it. I just couldn’t see that this image had a ‘cinematic’ sense of framing or a ‘distinct, fully-rendered persona’. I liked the detail of her hat and jacket and t-shirt, but I had the overwhelming sense that I’ve seen thousands of other images like this one, big-eyed, small-nosed, fresh-faced teens.

Installation view of This is Manga – The Art of Urasawa Naoki @ Japan House. Photo by the author

The most novel feature of the exhibition was a kind of tent Urasawa has made from fabric strips running from the floor up to a central spine to create a ‘tent’ which visitors can walk through, getting very up close to a range of his characters.

Installation view of This is Manga – The Art of Urasawa Naoki @ Japan House. Photo by the author

There was some variety of characterisation. In fact, the variety of faces reminded me of the panels you get inside the hardback editions of Tintin books, where you’re presented with a gallery of all the characters from all the Tintin stories. When I was a boy I used to love trying to identify them all.

But still. There were a lot of faces on the tent which seemed, to me, to be elementary, basic, entry level, manga faces. Wide-eyed children with tiny noses, mouths agape at some wonder.

Installation view of This is Manga – The Art of Urasawa Naoki @ Japan House. Photo by the author

Probably I’m missing the point. Looking at some of the specific storylines, you could see how Urasawi had in fact created distinctive-looking individuals to be Master Keaton or the 20th Century Boys or the hero of PLUTO, and that there is a range of, especially older characters who are drawn with the individuality I associate with Tintin or Lucky Luke.

And when I looked at the display frames explaining the strip MONSTER these brought out the importance of Urasawi’s clever / innovative / imaginative use of screentones, the layering of shades or stippling or dots to create depth and atmosphere in the backgrounds.

Unfortunately, MONSTER – despite its enormous success (the first fully-fledged mystery story in manga, it sold over 21 million copies and became an anime TV series) – is about a serial killer and the pages the curators had chosen to display showed a series of people just shooting each other in the head, and I was so repelled that I turned away, without paying much attention to the backgrounds.

Installation view of This is Manga – The Art of Urasawa Naoki @ Japan House, showing the protagonist of MONSTER, highlighting his modern ‘street’ styling (a bit Keanu Reeves), and the use of screentones to give cinematic depth to the image

As I strolled between recognisable, almost clichéd images of fresh-faced kids, and the altogether grittier style of something like MONSTER, I admit I was confused. Maybe I’m just putting into the words the difficulty I, a non-Japanese, who didn’t grow up on manga, have in really understanding the finer points and distinctions which seem to be extremely obvious to aficionados and fans.

More study required!!

A broader history of manga

Talking of study, alongside all the panels and display cases devoted to Urasawi Naoki, his biography, achievements, style and characters, and the detailed looks at the visual worlds he has created for individual strips – was another series of information panels about the broader history of manga, which I found in many ways easier to process, because they were dealing with straightforward facts, figures, dates and names.

Thus, in addition to what I had already picked up at the British Museum, I learned that:

• Manga evolved from picture book styles developed in the post Edo period of the late 19th century
• the modern form of manga was pioneered after World War Two by Tezuka Osamu, who is sometimes referred to as the god of manga
• Tezuka introduced modern narrative techniques, complex characters and themes, and a visual language derived from cinema
• His 1947 manga The New Treasure Island sold a huge number of copies and helped to crystallise the style and content of the new genre

But probably the biggest impression these information panels made on me was in conveying the scale and the speed of manga production, and the combination of extreme skill, with inventiveness, and prolific production rates, accompanied by a consistent style and level of quality, which is required for this high-pressure, high-profile and very demanding profession.

• manga artists (mangaka) need to produce approximately twenty pages of strips every few days for magazines published on a monthly or weekly basis
• typical mangaka work in a small studio with a few assistants under the supervision of a creative editor
• if the series is successful it may be republished in a trade paperback named a tankōbon
• it might also be turned into a TV series, a live action or animated movie

Further information panels gave good explanations of the visual codes which have evolved to convey emotion and meaning, the role of framing and the way the selection and framing of images creates a rhythm, the social context of manga immediately after the war and how successive generations of artists have added layers of sophistication, characterisation and, above all, an ever-expanding range of subjects to the empire of manga.

Summary

It’s FREE. It offers an in-depth understanding of the work and practice of one of the leading contemporary manga artists at work today. And the Japan House itself is a place of beauty to admire and wander round. And it closes at the end of tomorrow.

Get your skates on!

Related links

• This is Manga – the Art of Urasawi Naoki continues at Japan House until 27 July
• YouTube video of an extended interview with Urasawi Naoki
• Japan House website

Upcoming events at Japan House

• Saturday 27 July – Workshop: What is Manga? Drawing Workshop by KUTSUWADA Chie
• Tuesday 30 July – Film Screening: The Manga Master
• Wednesday 31 July – Draw Your Own Manga Page: Workshop by Elena VITAGLIANO

Other reviews of Japanese history or art

• Manga @ the British Museum (July 2019)
• Sheer Pleasure: Frank Brangwyn and the Art of Japan @ the William Morris Gallery (May 2017)
• Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese art @ British Museum (December 2013)

• China’s War with Japan 1937 – 1945 by Rana Mitter (2013)
• Nemesis: The Battle For Japan 1944 to 1945 by Max Hastings (2007)